Ever curious, Charles headed cross country at A Place for Plants
A year and a week ago we were touring summer gardens in England. We started in Suffolk again because that is where Charles and Gill Notcutt live. Today we heard that Charles has died.
On that last trip, Charles met us at Beth Chatto’s garden for lunch. While he was much more a tree man than a flower and garden man, I still recall his great pleasure at the delight and inspiration Mark and I felt in the dry garden there. He then said “follow me” and drove off in his Audi while we climbed into our very modest little rental car. What followed was an alarming pursuit through the back roads of Suffolk as we tried to keep Charles’ car in view because we had no idea where we were going. It was to Rupert and Sara Eley’s “A Place for Plants”. From there we went to Charles and Gill’s home where they hosted a dinner party in our honour.
This Suffolk pub, and I could find its name if I needed to, served the best ever hot chips with lunch
The next day he took us to Blooms of Bressingham, we had lunch at a Suffolk pub which served the best hot chips Mark and I had ever eaten (nobody, we discovered, can do chips as well as some English pubs) and then went on to The Old Vicarage Garden in Norfolk. The next morning we said goodbye and headed north to Yorkshire.
These are such lovely memories to have and even at the time, we knew it may be the last time we would see Charles. Others will record his contribution to British horticulture through Notcutts’ nurseries and garden centres and various trade and professional bodies. It was how we first met him in the early nineties. He was also extremely active in contributing to his local community of Woodbridge, even serving as mayor in recent times.
It is Charles the man that we remember. He had an exceptional zest for life, such wide ranging interests – a modern Renaissance Man – underpinned by great kindness. We held him in the highest regard and felt privileged to have him as a friend in our lives.
RIP Charles. Our lives were made richer for having known you.
It rained yesterday. A lot. We are accustomed to heavy rain here and are blessed with very free draining soils. The dogs hate the rain and won’t go out until it is near emergency time for them. But the rain, it continued. Mark lost track of the rain gauge around 200ml during the day.
Down in our park is the lowest area of our property but over the years, we had eliminated flooding with a weir, flood channel and stop banks. Until yesterday. That is what we refer to as the high bridge in the very centre behind the magnolia – featured often in photographs. It is a low grade phone camera image because I was not going to risk my new camera in the torrential rain. The water is flowing right over the bridge.
In fact the better part of park was flooded and resembled a raging torrent. It is usually such a quiet little stream that flows through. Half of it is channelled through the garden as here, and half is diverted down the separate flood channel. It all became one yesterday.
When we made our way out to the road, we saw why our park was flooding. This is the corner where the stream enters our property.
And the scene to the right of the intersection which is also our place.
But nothing must stop the petrochemical traffic (though we notice it has stopped today so the road damage must be a concern). This massive LNG tanker ploughed blindly through without checking that there was still road beneath, which was a bit of a surprise to us.
The ute that tried it next was not so lucky. He hit the water too fast and stalled. Fortunately help was to hand for towing him out because the water was flowing through his vehicle and the current could well have swept it away.
There is a lesson on negotiating flood waters, even in the big 4 wheel drive offroad vehicles much favoured today. We noticed a Jeep Cherokee in our carpark, but didn’t find out until later in the day that it too had stalled in the water. The occupants had to escape through a window because the water was up the doors. It was towed to the closest safe place, which was ours. We joked about claiming salvage rights over it but he arrived today to try and start it. It didn’t. Start, I mean, so it is still parked there.
The shocker was this car. It is just around the corner to the right, out of view to those of us on the other road. The occupants were our elderly neighbours who had to be rescued out of the car window. They were very shocked, but not otherwise injured. With hindsight, we worry how close they came to drowning and none of us on the other road would even have known they were there, a few metres out of sight.
This morning, the waters were receding. It is messy but we have not yet found any major damage on our place. Others have not been as lucky. It is perhaps a timely warning about the power of Nature and the increasing frequency of what are referred to as “extreme weather events. And always live in a house on a hill, not on a flood plain.
Where Mark and dogs are standing was half a metre under water at this time yesterday.
I have a new camera and while I am still learning to use it, I doubt that I could have captured the monarchs on the montanoa with my old one, even before it decided to shuffle off the mortal coils and go where digital cameras go to die. 
It was a comment left on this site that had me heading down to check out the montanoa on a sunny mid-winter’s day, to find it positively dancing with monarch butterflies. “It’s a natural food source for monarch butterflies, as it also comes from Mexico”, the reader said. Given that monarchs are recorded as self-introducing to this country around 1840 and generally produce two generations a year, that means at least 350 generations have passed since the Mexican connection so I think the montanoa is perhaps better described as being an “indigenous food source for monarch butterflies in Mexico”. But a source of winter nectar, it certainly is. It was a joy to see. 
I was so discouraged when I left the scene of institutional and bureaucratic vandalism that was the 
And at home I raised my eyes upwards to drink in the sights of our trees. We have many large trees here, evergreen and deciduous, native and introduced. While by no means the largest of our trees, this scene of magnolias, silver birch and Queen Palm (Syagrus romanzoffiana) soothed my soul.
Persimmons. These are a glorious sight in autumn but more decorative than useful here. Ours is an old astringent variety – mouth-puckeringly so until it is super ripe and then I really only like the jelly-like centre segments. We don’t eat many of them. I tried buying the fruit of the non-astringent recent introductions, which can be eaten at the crisp stage like an apple. I was a little underwhelmed – I preferred apples.
I recently read that persimmon fruit dry well and even the astringent types can be picked before fully ripe, sliced and dried and they will lose their astringency. Truly, we were very sceptical. But it works. It really does. The first batch I sliced, skin and all, and dried on a rack over our woodburner. It was a bit hot for them and the skin was a little tough. This second batch I used a sharp knife to remove the skin – which wasn’t difficult – and then sliced and put in the oven on fan bake at a very low temperature for several hours. They aren’t fully dried so I will store them in small packages in the deep freeze lest they go mouldy in our humid climate.
If you like dried fruit or eat muesli, they will make an excellent addition. I plan on using them as a substitute for dried apricots. They don’t taste the same but they will fill the same role. As with any dried food, they shrivel away to very little. I doubt that my forays into dried persimmons are going to make much of an inroad to our total crop – I won’t be drying hundreds of them and there is a large crop on the tree. But we are always interested in adding variety to our diet and dried persimmons take little effort to utilise a crop that we would otherwise waste. 
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 