I scolded Dad for cutting corners with his fungiculture — he had turned the mass too little, he hadn’t been particular enough about the temperature of the hotbed, which was crucial. This can’t have been much fun for him. Mum joined in with me in what must have been a horrendous alliance. To be hen-pecked and chick-pecked simultaneously, what a fate.
I was already firmly established as the family’s telephone wheedler, and I got on the phone to the farm. ‘I’m afraid there’s something gone wrong with our crop — do you want to come and inspect it?’ Suppressed panic leaked down the line. The response was very clear: Don’t for God’s sake bring them here!
Dad said he didn’t see the harm in us paying a visit. Privately I thought we would be as welcome as Blind Pew at the Admiral Benbow, primed to pass on the Black Spot to poor Billy Bones, but I also thought it might be fun to make them sit up and take notice. We took a few of our stricken mushrooms with us, though we left them politely in the car. We were relying quite a bit on the ‘knock’ effect of the wheelchair. The chair always knocked people back, and then they tended to lose track of their normal behaviour patterns.
Knock knock! Who’s there? Abel. Abel who? Able-bodied dismay. I asked the farmer if there was any medicine we could administer to our defective mushrooms.
‘Um … There’s powder I could give you.’
‘Will that work?’
‘No. I’m not hopeful. Best to dispose of them carefully and start again from scratch.’
All the same, they gave us a huge tray of mushrooms to compensate for the failure of our crop. This was a very welcome knock-on effect of our visit. We were many pounds of mushrooms to the good, though the truth was that we none of us cared all that much for mushrooms. It was the activity that was important, the uniting fever of a hobby, and the mushrooms, like the wine we made, were a sort of side-effect, almost a nuisance which we would have done without if we’d been able.
When both of us enjoyed the product as well as the process, though, we made quite a team. I privately claimed credit for having made the conservatory happen, but I have to give Dad his due in matters of siting and temperature control. He knew what he was doing. The dry, desert half of the conservatory was for Mum, of course, but also cacti (mainly grown from seed) and Drosophyllums to boot, though the first few batches didn’t seem too happy. It’s a temperamental plant, though, everyone knows that. The dry bit of the conservatory had a door into the garden for when it grew too hot, even for Mum.
The damp greenhousy part, which was kept shadier, had no external door. There was plenty of sun both morning and evening, with shade being provided by the trees, carefully pruned to allow a rich flow of air under their branches and over the greenhouse top. Just the sort of conditions your Cymbidium orchid is partial to. Moving patches of sunlight generated a really nice tropical fug, ideal for drosera, sarracenias and (even if it was just the once) an Australian byblis which Dad raised from seed.
It all worked beautifully, even if Drosophyllum wasn’t persuaded yet. I would have liked to convey my appreciation to Dad, but compliments were never really part of our currency, in either direction.
An anarchist commune for seeds
Even after the mushroom débâcle I hadn’t altogether lost my touch with Dad. It made sense to go on pressurising him for things, just to keep in practice for when it was really important. In one of his Telegraphs, probably a Sunday one, I saw an advertisement for an eiderdown called the Margaret Erskine Dream-Cloud. There was a splendid picture illustrating the virtues of the product. It showed a girl ensconced under her eiderdown, warm as toast, radiantly smiling, despite the ice blocks surrounding her, which seemed to crimp the crust-edges of a strawberry-apple-girl pie.
I wanted a Dream-Cloud immediately. It was the perfect solution to my odd combination of needs, my love of fresh air in all seasons and weather coupled with this body’s intolerance of cold. There were various levels of insulating excellence, with goose down at the top. That’s what I wanted, goose down and nothing less, and I wore Dad down, though he did some bargaining of his own. It was finally agreed that the Dream-Cloud represented two birthdays and one Christmas. Dad said, ‘You’d just better promise that you’ll make it last.’ That was just like him, to save face by taking a hard line — even after he had caved in.
I read and re-read Gardening for Adventure, from its first page to the last, and the ones after that. I’ve always had a particular fondness for indexes, bibliographies and postscripts — everything that publishers call ‘back matter’. Gardening for Adventure had something I myself had lacked for some years now, an Appendix, which listed suppliers of plants. Number 17 on the list of 35 was Major V. F. Howell, of Firethorn, Oxshot Way, Cobham, Surrey. There were other suppliers relatively near, but I have to admit I was attracted by the idea of ordering plants from a Major.
Majors have popped up at the edge of my life from time to time — starting with the Air Force colleague and friend of Dad’s, Kit Draper, who was officially known as the Mad Major. All of them have been somewhat eccentric, though I doubt if the rank of Major actively generates quirks. More likely it’s the highest military position compatible with independence of mind.
I wrote to Major Howell asking for his terms of business. When he wrote back I felt that my choice of him had immediately been vindicated. His ‘catalogue’ was made up of sheets of foolscap paper. There was an introductory paragraph, and then a bald list of the Latin names of plant seeds he had in stock, typed in capital letters. Major Howell’s seed exchange was totally egalitarian. Seeds were seeds were seeds were seeds. Common grass seed might sit next to the most exotic orchids, and the strychnine tree be cheek by jowl with meadowsweet — but only if their alphabetical position dictated that arrangement. In Major Howell’s pages, breeding meant nothing, family meant nothing, and size meant nothing. CYMBIDIUM and COCOS NUCIFERA were in hailing distance of one another on the page, although Cymbidium is an orchid plant with seed so fine it blows away at the slightest puff of wind, travelling almost infinitely far, and Cocos nucifera is a monster.
This was not a conventional business at all but something described as a ‘seed exchange’, a loving and utopian project. We were already living in the Age of Aquarius, though we didn’t yet know it. Rumours trickled across the Atlantic with the news that on the New York stage naked performers mixed with the audience at the end of a show called Hair, and in Surrey a military man was running a commercial enterprise as if it was some sort of anarchist commune for seeds.
I passed the list across to Dad, who read through it closely before declaring, ‘The chap’s obviously potty. Take this item, for heaven’s sake …’ — he pointed out a name on the list — ‘it’s so darn common I only have to open the kitchen window and lean out and it’s almost in the palm of my hand. And Cocos nucifera … Have you any idea what that is?’
‘Is it a kind of palm?’
‘Not bad, not bad,’ Dad said. ‘Cocos nucifera is a coconut. Nothing more, nothing less. Why buy a coconut from this chappie? I can get a coconut in Maidenhead!’
‘I think …’ I said, instinctively defending the Major’s eccentricities, ‘the Major is referring to the fact that it may be a mere coconut, but that doesn’t stop it being a seed. Why should the poor coconut be banned from a seed-list? A seed is what it is. Aren’t you always telling me not to make the mistake of despising a plant because it’s common?’