Peas and beans in the garden

I've just planted out some peas and beans. Sadly, the autumn-sown peas and beans didn't survive the winter, mainly because I was too idle to cover them through the harsh weather. The rotting remnants of the plants stayed in the ground just outside the kitchen window all through February, causing one visitor to remark on how well my compost heap was doing.

So I went to the garden centre and found some sturdy little plants; the weedy-looking sweet peas in the middle were germinated on the kitchen windowsill, and I've planted them out before pinching them out and giving them a chance to bulk up because I had them in tiny little plugs which wasn't doing their lovely long roots any good at all. So it's kill or cure. Fingers crossed.

Dahlias for 2010

This is Sarah Raven's list of new dahlias to look out for next season; I've torn the page out of today's Telegraph, but I'd rather the paper was in the bin and the information somewhere I can be sure of finding it.

Blacks, crimsons and deep reds

D4 - a decorative group, small black dahlia which has not yet been named
Karma Choc - waterlily, 2-3ft, Winchester Growers had it at Chelsea
Tamburo - semi-cactus, half the size of Chat Noir
Tahoma Moonshot - orchid, star-shaped (note to self: not as beautiful as the red star-shaped dahlia in the fruit cage which came from Ayletts)
Spartacus - large-flowered decorative, a little like Thomas Edison
McAllisters Pride - cactus, gold heart and crimson red petals

Purples and magenta

Purple Haze - decorative
Jocondo - giant decorative

Pinks and corals

Classic Rosamunde - classic group, semi-double, looks like a Japanese anemone. SR says it was covered in bees when she saw it at de Boschhoeve (note to self, my favourite of the dahlias illustrated)
Sugar Diamond - cactus, smokey antiqu pink, SR says would be good mixed with a bright pink eg Geerlings Jubilee
Juliet - single, similar to Magenta Star which you can only get at the moment as a rooted cutting (and which did well here last year). Pretty, single flowers which contrast with black foliage

Orange

Happy Halloween - decorative. Robust, floriferous, "the perfect orange dahlia"
Olympic Fire - bishop. Similar to Bishop of Oxford, but better - dk foliage contrasts with semi-double burnt orange flowers (there's a photo, and it's a must-have for next year)
City of Rotterdam - cactus. Compact, 20" Covered in spiky orange "sea urchin" flowers. Good for pots
Scura - topmix. V small, flowers the size of a £2 coin. Graceful, elegant, good in a pot.

Some of these are in a Telegraph special offer as rooted cuttings. Otherwise in spring from Sarah Raven and from Winchester Growers, the national collection holder just outside Penzance.

Rabbit pie, anyone?

Herstmonceux Castle, Sussex

Garden notes

Last week was not good. I suddenly came upon a pot of last year's tulips (Red Hunter) and they made me feel better. They are in full flower now, opening with the sunshine. Very cheering.

My annual Easter arrangement consists of beech hung with painted eggs. It's crucial to pick the boughs ahead, so that they come into leaf, otherwise the decoration is just twigs. The weekend before is not too soon. This Easter I had twigs and eggs (assembled on Good Friday). Now I have a vibrant green display .... but Easter was so late this year that they're barely ahead of the leaves in the wood. Our bluebells are starting to come out, too.

Guess who's coming to dinner - a gardeners' meme

Here's an interesting idea: which three or four gardeners would you invite to dinner? They don't have to be alive, just to make the fantasy more difficult to decide on.

First I'd go for my great-grandfather, the Rev Henry Ewbank, who spent forty or so years pushing the boundaries of horticulture from his gardens in Ryde, Isle of Wight. He was a scientist by inclination, he was rich enough to be able to buy interesting plants and seeds from the plant hunters who explored the world in the latter half of the 19th century, he was the first to overwinter a Mojave yucca in Britain. He also had a tulip named after him, which you can buy from the tulip museum in Holland.

I'd also invite Christopher Lloyd, because you could say many of the same things about him that I've just written about Henry Ewbank. And because I like his books a lot. Also his garden.

And Roger Phillips, whose photographic categorising books are so helpful, lovely and learned. Bulbs, Trees, Roses, and Wild Flowers are my favourites. And because the book he wrote with Leslie Land, The 3,000 Mile Garden, is my favourite comfort reading.

Oh, and of course Joseph Paxton. This is what he wrote in his diary the first day he went to work at Chatsworth:

I left London by the Comet Coach for Chesterfield, and arrived at Chatworth at half past four o'clock in the morning of the ninth of May 1826. As no person was to be seen at that early hour, I got over the greenhouse gate by the old covered way, explored the pleasure grounds, and looked round the outside of the house. I then went down to the kitchen gardens, scaled the outside wall and saw the whole place, set the men to work there at six o'clock; then returned to Chatsworth and got Thomas Weldon to play me the water works, and afterwards went to breakfast with poor dear Mrs Gregory and her niece. The latter fell in love with me, and I with her, and thus completed my first morning's work at Chatsworth before nine o'clock.

Unbeatable.

Thanks to Veg Plotting for organising this.

PS, now furious with myself for forgetting to invite Thomas Jefferson

How to stop mice and blackfly stealing your legumes

I have NO IDEA where these tips came from, they're just scribbled (in my writing) on a piece of scrap paper which has come to light in the great January tidy-up. Useful though, especially if they turn out to work.

1. To stop blackfly eating your broad beans in April, spray them with nicotine water, which you make by boiling loose tobacco in water. I suppose you could steal a couple of cigarettes off a passing smoker.

2. Soak your peas in paraffin for half an hour before planting. Anathema to mice, apparently.

No idea if these tips actually work, but now I can throw away the piece of paper, knowing that the information is still to hand (should I remember come spring).

Happy New Year

I like my new year resolutions to be positive, so amongst this year's selection: more walks, visit more galleries, more time in the garden, learn to cook new and challenging foods.

More walking will be easy, with views like this only minutes from our house:



































And in anticipation of spring blossoms, Viburnum x bodnantense: lovely scent, like all winter flowers ... I don't have it in my garden, so that's another positive resolution made

A recipe for bumblebees in your garden

I'm always a little surprised when I read that British bumblebees are in decline to the point of near-extinction, because there are so many in our garden. This morning I discovered the reason: I have the same taste in flowers as bumblebees.

Bumblebees are one of the early signs of spring in our garden: when the snowdrops are in full flower, there they are, bumbling about on the rosemary bush by the kitchen door. And I see them daily until the end of autumn. I thought that's how it was in all gardens, but apparently not.

Here's the recipe for encouraging bumblebees into your garden:

• make sure you have some early-flowering plants such as crocus, rosemary, clematis, fruit blossom - you will find these just as life-enhancing as the bumblebees, which come out earlier than other bees (the queens come out of hibernation in February)
  
• in summer, give up bedding in favour of cottage garden flowers and native wildflowers. Sages, foxgloves, thymes, thistles of all sorts (including artichokes, if you can bear to let some of them flower)
• in high summer leave at least some of your lawn uncut, so that bumblebees can feed on clover and birdsfoot trefoil
• plant a wildflower meadow, however small - you can use seed saved from verges in your area if the price of a packet seems high
  
• opt for single and semi-double flowers rather than doubles
• plant a wide range of bumblebee-friendly plants, to encourage several of the 25 British species - three are already said to be nationally extinct. Bumblebees have different-lengthed tongues, so need different types of flower to get at the nectar
• provide somewhere for bumblebees to overwinter. You can buy or make special nesters, but our garden is untidy enough for bumblebees to be left to their own devices

This is a seasonal list of bumblebee-friendly plants supplied by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. We have most of them in our garden (no heathers though - wrong soil):

February, March and April: apple, bluebell, broom, bugle, cherry, erica carnea (heather), flowering currant, lungwort (pulmonaria), pear, plum, pussy willow, red dead-nettle, rosemary, white dead-nettle

May and June: alliums, aquilegia, birdsfoot trefoil, bugle, campanula, ceanothus, chives, comfrey, cotoneaster, escallonia, everlasting sweet pea, everlasting wallflower, foxglove, geranium, honeysuckle, laburnum, lupin, meadow cranesbill, monkshood, poppies, raspberries, red campion, single roses, sage, salvia, thyme, vetch, white clover, wistaria, woundwort

July and August: borage, bramble, buddleia, cardoon, catmint, cornflower, delphinium, heathers, hollyhock, hyssop, knapweed, lavender, lesser burdock, marjoram, mint, penstemon, purple loosestrife, red clover, rock-rose, sainfoin, scabious, sea holly, snapdragons, St John's wort, sunflower, teasel, thistles, viper’s bugloss

Pumpkins to grow and eat

These are the results of Sarah Raven's pumpkin trial, conducted this summer in the terrible conditions we had for squash. It was published in the Telegraph a few Saturdays ago - irritating, because who buys their seed now? But if I don't blog the results, the paper will float about the house for months, and I won't be able to find it when I need it. This post is all about striking a blow for tidiness.

I've grown some of these pumpkins, and completely agree with Sarah's findings, which is why I'm keen to keep hold of all this information for the moment when it's actually needed. And because not all of you may have a husband who is addicted to the Telegraph. The looks/longevity is for the florist in you; taste for your inner cook.

Crown of Thorns
Ornamental; stringy
Looks/longevity: 7/10
Taste: 2/10

Crown Prince
The blue one. Good taste; excellent storer. Seeds "horrid"
Looks/longevity: 10/10
Taste: 9/10

Giant Pink Banana
Huge. Good for soup. Flavour ok (not outstanding). Seeds "like cardboard"
Looks/longevity: 6/10
Taste: 7/10

Lumpy
Good producer. Watery/bland. Only good for lanterns
Looks/longevity: 6/10
Taste: 0/10

Zucca de Marmellata
Size varies wildly. Used in Italy for jams and chutneys. Seeds ok. Favourite of whole trial
Looks/longevity: 8/10
Taste: 9/10

Munchkin
Chestnutty flavour. Lovely tiny seeds. Ideal climbing plant over willow teepees
Looks/longevity: 10/10
Taste: 8/10

Potiron Tristar Triamble
Heavily rippled blue-green skin. Biggest producer. Not much flavour. Seeds good but tough
Looks/longevity: 10/10
Taste: 8/10

Queensland Blue
Similar to Crown Prince. Good producer, excellent storer. Seeds ok
Looks/longevity: 10/10
Taste: 9/10

Red Kuri
aka Uchikiri, aka red onion squash. Lovely sweet taste; skin soft enough to eat. In the top three
Looks/longevity: 9/10
Taste: 10/10

Rouge Vif d'Etampes
Huge, beautiful, poor producer. Sweet taste. Seeds okay
Looks/longevity: 10/10
Eating: 9/10

Snowman
Creamy green skin, creamy coloured flesh which is bright green at the seeds. Light cropping. Delicious, nutty flavour. Large tasty seeds. Will grow again
Looks/longevity: 8/10
Taste: 8/10

Sweet Dumpling
V dense dry flesh. Parsnip-like flavour. Good producer. Tiny tasty seeds. Good in small garden, can be trained up fence/trellis
Looks/longevity: 8/10
Taste: 7/10

Turk's Turban
Beautiful, ornamental only as stringy/watery/bland. Large tough tasty seeds. Only grow for ornament
Looks/longevity: 9/10
Taste: 2/10


As I typed out these findings, I realised that the marks are not entirely consistent with the remarks - but this information is a good starting point for seed-buying decisions in the spring. I've grown three of these, and regularly eat two more, and agree with every word. Now I'm looking forward to growing Queensland Blue and Zucca de Marmellata. Any comments from any of you who have grown some of these? Or further recommendations?


Related posts

Pumpkin in chilli oil
Butternut squash with parsley and mint softly spiced with cinnamon, a really good addition to a vegetarian dinner
Stuffed butternut squash - this is one of my most-visited posts, and a good cheap supper dish
Roast squash bites with pumpkin seed pesto - fabulous finger food, full of goodness
Pumpkin risotto

Tasty tomatoes to grow next year

This blighted year has been hopeless for growing tomatoes - what with one thing (slugs) and another (blight), we've had very few, Sungold doing best (although my extremely conservative family would prefer it red, rather than that wonderful yellow).

At the end of August, there was an article in the Telegraph by Sarah Raven about home-grown tomatoes with the best taste. Here are her key findings - now I can chuck out the paper yet still be sure of finding this very sensible list next year.

Her main piece of advice is to grow one or two of several varieties: any tomato dish is better for having a mix of varieties - different shape, colours and sizes, all with varying levels of sweetness and acidity. If you use three or four different forms, your salads will look more attractive, your sauces will be richer, and your tomato jams and chutneys will taste better.

Sungold: truly outstanding. Can be grown inside and out.

Gardener's Delight: Sarah has long championed this tomato, which just beat Super Sweet 100 in her trial this year. Both form long trusses which ripen over a long period for nonstop harvesting.

Black Krim: this tomato comes from Crimea. I've never grown it, but I have eaten it - delicious, once you've got over the monstrous appearance of black skin and startlingly green inside. Sarah says it has good disease resistance, and that it was the last of her outdoor tomatoes to get blight this year.

Costoluto Fiorentino / Costoluto Genovese: two old varieties from Italy, better grown in a greenhouse. Highly productive of large fruit. She says that about one in eight plants will go blind ... mine (outdoors) were the first to get blight this year.

Brandywine: obviously wonderful, but tricky to grow - it only performs well in a greenhouse in a good hot year, and even then only produces small amounts of fruit. Very comforting words to someone who has tried and failed several times to grow this delicious giant fruit.

Tigerella: medium-sized, stripey green and red skin. We got a few of this before the blight struck. Sarah's sister grows this under glass in Edinburgh, Sarah says it can be grown outdoors in the south of England.

Red Alert: outshines all other tumblers in terms of flavour. No need to train, can go in a window box, gives vast amounts of tasty fruit

Sarah also says that she's not going to bother with plum tomatoes next year, as they have a grainy texture, are quite dry and not good eaten raw, even the foodies' favourite, San Marzano, which I don't think is as good as is claimed. The best, she thinks, is the hardier Purple Russian, but she says not as good as any of the others on her list.

Things to do with tomatoes

Roasting tomatoes
Roasted tomato ketchup
Slow roasted tomatoes
Homemade tomato ketchup - and caponata-ish
Panzanilla
Chilli jam

Links to tomatoes on other blogs

Fried green tomatoes - haven't you always wanted to know how to make these? Here's how, from the blog at the Whistlestop Cafe
David Lebovitz's take on an heirloom tomato salad
Gazpacho from Kalyn's Kitchen

Roses for midsummer

Here, before I lose it, is Sarah Raven's list of the 10 best roses for cutting:

1. Princess Alexandra - long-stemmed, magenta, scented, nearly thornless, lasts at least a week in a vase

2. White Gold - a newish Harkness rose, ivory with a tint of green buds opening to white-gold with a pinkish tinge. Scented. Long flowering season, lasts in a vase.

3. William Shakespeare 2000 - dark crimson David Austin rose, well scented. Other reds worth growing are the shrub rose Isabella (almost black, good in a vase but unhappy in the rain), and Big Purple (an HT which needs hard pruning in winter).

4. Golden Celebration - good fragrance, good vase life. Orange/apricot-yellow

5. Graham Thomas - clearer and lighter yellow than (4). Flowers both early and late. Either shrub or climber.

6. Susan - continuous flowering, good scent, lasts better in the vase than any other white rose

7. Winchester Cathedral - delicate white with dark golden stamens, similar to Margaret Merril, but with a longer flowering season, better disease resistance and stronger scent. David Austin

8. Gertrude Jekyll - true clear pink. Repeat flowers until October, the cut flowers last for days. Strongly scented. Very prickly shrub rose

9. Buttercup - another David Austin rose, semi-double flowers in a rich deep yellow with a strong tea scent

10. Louise Odier - a classic French rose (climbing or shrub) producing sprays of lightly-scented pink flowers through to autumn


Sarah recommends cutting roses on short stems to improve vase life, particularly those which tend to a short vase life (Mme Isaac Pereire and Mme Grégoire Staechelin), unless they have good strong stems (Princess Alexandra).

It's striking how many of these are David Austin roses. I'm sorry she left out Pat Austin, a very striking and lovely rose. Also The Pilgrim. And Noble Anthony. But now I'm starting on my own top 10 ...


One Hour Later:

I've just turned the page in last Saturday's Telegraph (not yesterday's - it takes me at least eight days to catch up with the papers), and found more rose recommendations, this time from Michael Marriott, who is a key man at David Austen Roses (and a very good lecturer). Here's his list:

1. A Shropshire Lad - peachy pink 6ft climber, thornless

2. Harlow Carr - strong pink, very healthy

3. Teasing Georgia - healthy, strong tea fragrance, yellow

4. Lady Emma Hamilton - tangerine flowers, one of the most delicious of all varieties for fragrance

5. Queen of Denmark - soft pink, tough, strong fragrance (happy growing under a large birch tree in MM's garden)

6. Celsiana - single flowers, soft pink paling with age, very reliable

7. R forrestiana - one of the best of the species roses, with deep, dusky crimson flowers that are very attractive to bees, followed by shiny crimson hips

8. R Californica plena - semi-double, almost a species rose, free-flowering and well scented

9. Cécile Brunner - covered in pale pink flowers

10. Adelaide d'Orléans - pure white semi-double flowers arching down, good for a pergola

Marriott also makes some suggestions: choose Mortimer Sackler instead of disease-prone Zéphirine Drouhin; Crown Princess and Teasing Georgia over "not so reliable and leggy" Gloire de Dijon (how COULD he??); The Generous Gardener over Mme Alfred Carriere; and Snow Goose over Blush Noisette. Sensible suggestions, I'm sure, but not advice I'd feel inclined to take in three out of the four - but then, I'm perfectly capable of ignoring the weeds or the blackspot and looking with pleasure straight at the lovely flower.

The last list in this Telegraph special on the 30 best roses is a rather depressing list of "top 10 disease-resistant roses" - a depressing list of mainly HT, "ground cover" and "patio" roses.

Mottisfont Abbey

Yesterday Amy and I went to the wonderful rose garden designed by Graham Stuart Thomas at Mottisfont Abbey ... at their peak for the next couple of weeks: beautiful, scented, a magical place in the Test Valley, peaceful and timeless. Sorry for all the clichés ... they fit with the planting - all paeonies, pinks and white foxgloves mingled with shrub roses against the ancient brick walls.

Lunch was a Mottisfont tradition: egg and watercress sandwiches, with ginger beer. Mmm
























Without trying, I found the rose we will plant as a hedge beneath our pergola of climbing roses .. Mrs Anthony Waterer, a serious improvement on the plain pink rugosa rose I was planning to use until yesterday morning. This rose was developed in 1898 by Waterers, the now-defunct world-famous nursery a couple of villages from here, R rugosa x Général Jacqueminot, described by Peter Beales as semi-double, shapely, rich deep crimson flowers, freely produced on a vigorous, broad, thorny bush with dark green foliage, well scented. What more could you ask? So bright it almost hurts your eyes, and the colour doesn't fade to nothing as the flowers go over. The photograph does it no justice.


















Oh, and I came home with a pretty French rose, de Meaux, one of those ancient plants marked as pre-1789 because their origins were lost during the upheavals of the revolution. It seems to me that it will be both lovely and trouble-free for people to have gone to the trouble of preserving it through those terrible times. It has a mass of tiny pink flowers, and is scented.

Here is one of Mottisfont's three ancient sweet chestnuts, the bark alone makes me want to plant one. And you may just spot a fat old trout swimming against the current ...

After the rain

In our garden now.

Delicious ...

... well, for the snails, anyway!

Clarissa Dickson Wright's nettle beer

Here is a rare recipe for this blog: one I haven't tried. But it's nettle time of year; Gertrude asked me for the instructions but didn't leave an email address, so here they are. I know that there's a lot of interest in cooking with nettles, because my posts about nettle soup and nettle tea are amongst the most visited on Joanna's Food, particularly at this time of year, when they grow with such profusion.

I'm giving CDW's exact instructions, as found in A Greener Life. There is some suggestion that this helps with rheumatism; not sure I believe it, but it sounds worth a try.

Nettle beer

makes 4.5 litres

1 kilo of young nettle tops
zest and juice of 2 lemons
25g cream of tartar
500g demerara sugar or honey
4.5l water
15g brewers' yeast

Wear rubber gloves to pick the nettle tops. Wash and drain them. Place the lemon zest and juice, cream of tartar and sugar or honey in a large container, preferably an earthenware fermenting vessel. Put the nettles and water in a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Boil for 15 minutes. (This can be done in two batches.) Strain the liquid into the lemon juice mixture. Stir well. Allow to cool to around 21C/70F. Remove a little of the liquid and make a paste with the yeast. Stir into a large container. Cover with a layer of thick cloth, tied down so that it doesn't sag into the liquid.

Leave in a warm place for three days to help the yeast to activate. Strain into bottles and cork loosely. Store in a cool, dark place. It is drinkable in one week, but ... the longer you keep it, the better it be.

This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Cate at Sweetnicks

Links to other posts about nettles

Nettle tea
Nettle soup

Links to nettles on other blogs

Nettle and ricotta frittata from The Chocolate Lady
The Old Foodie on rennet from nettles
Chicken breast stuffed with nettles from Eating Britain

In my garden now ...

Better than the football, any day!

Why does this make my heart sing?

Planting roses for our pergola

After a huge Easter lunch we planted the roses which will climb over Lucius's wonderful pergola. Lucius and I went to buy them on Friday - we took two rose reference books, plus Stephen Lacey's Scented Garden, and went out to a pub. Over lunch we each drew up a list of scented climbing roses we liked, and found that there was plenty of overlap between the two. Then we went to Henry Street roses, where we made a third list of what they had (virtually everything on lists one and two). Over coffee, we turned these three scraps of paper into a shopping list, and this is what we bought:

Three David Austen roses, not very tall, but good do-ers: Tess of the D'Urbervilles (crimson), James Galway (pale pink), The Pilgrim (pale yellow) (2). One climbing Iceberg, the only unscented rose, bought because it will flower until Christmas, and because it is one of my father's favourites (and he planted it). Gloire de Dijon (buff, we've got one already here, it's lovely); Mme Isaac Pereire (deep pink); Zepherine Drouhin (cerise); Danse du feu (a bright orange-red semi-double); The New Dawn (pale pink), Mme Alfred Carriere pinkish white; and Guinee, the black rose, with deep velvety petals, which I can see from my desk.

Later, I'm going back to Henry Street to buy standard roses to go beneath the arches. And next week I'm going to take cuttings from my Munstead lavender to underplant - probably not the best time, but, in my experience, plants want to grow, so it's worth a try, and if they don't take, I'll go out and buy some plants - but my stock is very strongly scented, and that's important to me.

I'm also going to buy Albertine, a major casualty of our list-making, mainly because I was afraid she'd take over, and Schoolgirl, a coppery-apricot rose Lucius was particularly keen to have, but which I'm going to plant where he will be able to see it from his desk.

It's snowing now, so I'll take photographs of the pergola tomorrow .... SO exciting, knowing that these lovely roses are in the ground, stretching their roots and settling in.

Birthday flowers

Today it's my birthday, and I've had a stream of visitors. The first was Amy, standing on the doorstep with a lemon drizzle cake and LIT candles. The rest of my visitors have been eating lemon drizzle cake all morning.

Eleanor sent me tulips, really lovely tulips because she knows they are my favourite. Yellow and orange in a white jug, and brightening the kitchen table.

The garden ... well, I can hardly believe the presents it's given me today: the first tiny snowdrops, primroses, a cowslip in amongst the celandines, helebores galore (five different types), and one tiny purply-black iris reticulata. Oh yes, and a forgotten pot of last year's hyacinths left in the greenhouse instead of being planted out - badly in need of splitting - but starting to bloom today, and now on my desk.























Blue sky, too, a perfect cold winter's day, not like all the rain we've been having and all the grey skies that are forecast. Magical.

Sweet peas in autumn

Yesterday, at dusk, I heard the weather forecast. Cold night. I ran out into the gloom with my flower scissors and cut what I thought would be the last bunch of sweet peas for the year. The smell in my study this morning was overpowering.

A quick check in the garden shows that I was being unnecessarily gloomy; there are still many sweet peas worth picking, all of them this lovely variety with two names, Matucana, or Cupani's Original - a much better name as it hints at the history (it arrived in Britain from Sicily in the 17th century, sent by a monk named Cupani). This is the mother of all sweet peas, the first, the one with the strongest scent, the one with hints of all the colours that have been bred into a cultivated sweet pea. My favourite.











It can't last, we are past the equinox, and sweet peas respond to light. I've been picking them three or four times a week since the beginning of May. Although I grow other sweet peas, Cupani's original is my favourite - the strongest scent, the first to flower, the last to die back, with its beautiful maroon and purple flowers. How could all those nurserymen have thought they could improve on nature's own sweet pea?













PS the dahlia in the corner of this picture is a stunner, David Howard ... the photograph doesn't do it justice, I'll post a better one soon