Cures For 'Gardening Hands'

It’s June, and the year is half gone, so I think it’s time we took another look at Mrs CW Earle and discover what advice she has on offer for the month in her 1897 lifestyle guide, Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden (you can see my original post here).

 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries glycerine was regarded
as something of a wonder cure for skin ailments, and to keep
hands and skin soft. This advert dates from 1914.
(Pic from Cosmetics and Skin)

She starts with her thoughts on looking after your hands. She tells us:

It must admitted that one of the great drawbacks of gardening and weeding is the state into which the hands and fingers get. Unfortunately, one’s hands belong not only to oneself, but to the family, who do not scruple to tell the gardening amateur that her appearance is ‘revolting’.

She advocates constant washing of the hands, and recommends the ‘never-failing’ use of Vaseline to keep them smooth and soft. Actually, I’m not at all sure I’d want to smear my hands with Vaseline, because it’s horribly thick and sticky, and it wouldn’t be absorbed into the skin nice and quickly, like modern hand creams. Surely you’d leave sticky, greasy marks on everything you touched. Anyway, Mrs E offers an alternative which, she says, is even better – a mixture of glycerine and starch, kept ready on the washstand after washing and before drying the hands. I assume the starch would have been the old-fashioned laundry stuff, presumably in plentiful supply when the book was first published.

She also informs us that old dog-skin or kid gloves are better for weeding and many other tasks than ‘so-called’ garden gloves. And housemaids’ gloves, made from wash-leather, and available at any village shop, were ‘invaluable’ for ‘many purposes’.   

Wash-leather, I think, was what we used to call ‘shammy’ (or chamois) leather when I was a child. I seem to remember it was yellow, good for cleaning windows, and polishing metal, and could be used wet or dry, and washed and dried when it was dirty. In Victorian and Edwardian times housemaids wore wash-leather gloves, so I guess they were a precursor of today’s rubber gloves. Presumably they offered some protection for the hands, and also ensured maids didn’t leave grubby fingerprints on furnishings and surfaces!

If you followed Mrs Earle's advice, you'll have a good crop of
strawberries ready just in time for Wimbledon. Sadly, I didn't, so
I'll have to buy some to eat while I watch tennis on TV!
(Pic from BBC Good Food)

Anyway, June in the garden means strawberries,  and Mrs E explains:

For many years this fruit was poison to me; now it gives me pleasure to think that I live almost entirely upon it for some weeks in the summer, eating it three times a day, and very little else, according to the practice of Linnaeus, as quoted in March’

In growing strawberries, everything depends on making some new rows every year; layering the runners early, too, makes a great difference in the young plants the next year.

She also mentions that Dainty Dishes (her cookery ‘Bible’) has instructions for old-fashioned ‘receipts’ for strawberry jam – but, alas, she doesn’t share them with us! However, she gives us a selection of other recipes. Apparently, a mayonnaise soufflé of crab is ‘rather out of the common’ or a summer luncheon. It’s very much of its time, involving buttered paper inside the liner of a dish, seasoned crab, whipped aspic jelly, mayonnaise sauce, fried breadcrumbs and an icebox.

But never fear, there’s a ‘less complicated’ luncheon dish (does anyone still prepare ‘luncheon’ dishes I wonder):

Take some ripe tomatoes, equal-sized; cur a round hole and scoop out a portion of the middle, fill in with cold minced chicken and Mayonnaise sauce, put some aspic in the dish, and serve the tomatoes on pieces of fried bread, cold.

Life, as Shirley Conran said, is too short to stuff a mushroom, and I reckon the same thing could be said for tomatoes!

Cucumbers: Has anyone ever tried cooking them?
(Pic from Wikipedia)

In addition Mrs Earle instructs us in the art of making chutney, cooking crisp cauliflower - and cooking cucumber, which sounds odd, since we eat it raw in salads. Here you’ll find three different methods for serving cucumber hot, and I suppose it’s not really any different to cooking marrow or courgettes, just a little more watery perhaps. I’ve ignored her first two suggestions, but here’s the ‘receipt’ for the third:

A third way is to take a large old cucumber, peel it, cut of the two ends, and boil it very lightly. When done, make an incision down the middle, not quite to the two ends, scoop out the seeds, and fill the hollow with a light stuffing of suet, herbs, breadcrumbs, and egg. Serve it whole, like a roly-poly, with a yellow Dutch sauce around it.

I’d never come across yellow Dutch sauce, but it turns out to be hollandaise sauce, so the clue was there in the name. I’m tempted to try it, but with a different stuffing, but I’m worried the cucumber might disintegrate!

August in the Garden

I seem to have amassed a stack of gardening books, old and new, read and unread, which I love

to browse through, along with seed catalogues, imagining the riot of colour and perfume that I could create – only I spend so long looking at gardening books, there is no time left to do anything! Really though, they seem to lend themselves to the ‘slow read’ method, and perhaps I should like at them month by month, to see what I should be doing.

This month, for example, in The Curious Gardener, Anna Pavord begins by suggesting I should trim my evergreen hedges and reshape the topiary: since I have neither, I feel I can carry on reading with a clear conscience, unless I can stir myself to tackle the buddleia, which are not evergreen, and are not topiary, but they are striving for world domination, which is a problem in our tiny garden. So, being a curious gardener, I’ve just looked these up, and discovered I should have hard pruned them way back in March. So what do I do, cut them right back now and hope they survive, or wait until next spring and hope they don’t grow during the winter?

Actually Pavord’s book is fascinating, with lists of tasks to be carried out each month, and a selection of short essays on plants, gardens, and life in general. August includes a moving account of how the ‘swoony’ perfume of sweet peas helped recover from an operation for cancer, and a discourse on the lengths some gardeners go to in a bid to attract butterflies to their plots. This last seemed a particularly apt choice of reading matter, since I spent a couple of days recently spell-bound by the kaleidoscope of peacocks fluttering around the dreaded buddleias, so maybe I’ll just let them be, because the butterflies are so beautiful.

Karel Capek, writing in The Gardener’s Year back in 1929, informs us that: “August usually is the time when the amateur gardener forsakes his garden of wonder and goes on leave.” He follows this with a detailed description of the many and varied jobs that must be undertaken by the friend of relative who is entrusted with looking after the garden. There is mowing to be done, watering, staking and tying, weeding… and finding suitable spots for the plants gathered by the absent gardener whilst on his holiday, and posted home!

But Capek has serious points to make about our lives. According to him: “All year round is spring, and all through life is youth; there is always something which may flower. One only says that is autumn; we are merely flowering in other ways, we grow beneath the earth; we put forth new shoots, and there is always something to do.”

Capek was a Czech playwright and novelist who, apparently, invented the word robot, and I must read some of his fiction some time. Meanwhile I am enjoying his gardening book immensely. It is easy to read, and is a light-hearted look at gardening, which captures the joys (and the frustrations) of ordinary gardeners, and the little line drawings which are scattered throughout (by Josef Capek, who I assume was a relative), are an absolute delight.

I also took a look at the wonderful Katherine Swift, who I’ve written about before. She is probably my favourite gardening writer. I love her prose style, and the way she mixes information about her garden with thoughts about life, medicine, herbal lore, ancient myths and legends, history, geography, great gardeners of the past and all kinds of other topics. The pieces gathered together in The Morville Year were all originally published in The Times, and are informative and entertaining – a combination which is not always easy to achieve. For August, you’ll find entries about raspberries, climbing plants, summer pruning, dew, the dog days (so called because Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, rises and sets with the sun at this time of year), and bees on lavender.  Did you know the Latin for bumble-bee is bombus? The word, she says,’ perfectly conveys the sound - a deep resonant hum – as well as their bumbling progress from flower to flower’.

She describes six different types of bumble-bee feeding on her lavender, including the wonderfully named little lion-maned Carder bee, and the large red-tailed bumble bee (they have red tails, like foxes, and ‘huge shiny black transparent wings like glossy fifteen-denier stockings’). Unlike honey bees, bumble-bees don’t store honey – the colonies die at the end of the year, apart from the young, mated queens. I’d already decided that I’m planting to attract birds and insects, and after reading this I’m even more determined. How could I resist when there such are wondrous creatures in the world? For next year the buddleias stay, and I’m planting lavenders alongside them, different species to flower from May right through to the autumn frosts. And Swift says if you are trying to encourage bees into a garden it helps if you are not too tidy, and I am certainly not, so I’ve got a head start there!

Saturday Flowers!

I know it is Sunday, and I should not have a  Saturday Snapshot, but in some parts of the globe (like American Samoa and Hawaii) I believe it is still yesterday, which makes this post OK!

Anyway, this week's Snapshot is very brief (as well as being very late) because my mother is ill, and I am looking after her. So here is a picture I took yesterday of one of her fuschias, and a shot of part of her lovely garden, which is her pride and joy. Aged 85, she still does the garden herself, and grows the plants from seeds and cuttings - she has real 'green fingers' and sticks tiny fragments of flowers and shrubs into pots of earth, or even jars of water, and they flourish for her. She says she talks to them and that's what makes the difference!

Despite being so independent, she has allowed me to mow the grass - but only because she is not well enough to do it herself!

For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog at http://athomewithbooks.net/