What’s Brown and Sticky?

In the midst of death etc … I was up in the veg plot yesterday, clearing out the last of the broad beans and generally preparing for winter when I found that one of the mysteriously disappeared bulbs of garlic had not, in fact, disappeared, but had gone underground, as bulbs do, and was now busy putting up new shoots, possibly in a misguided belief that it was spring. I have my doubts that they will actually survive the winter, but I have carefully separated the cloves and planted them out individually just in case (the gardening columns all say now is a good time to plant garlic, but I suspect they’re written for southern softie type gardeners, not rufty-tufty Scottish ones).

And then, when I was clearing out the hawthorn sticks that I had put in to support the beans I found one of them had done this:

Not dead, only sleeping

That wasn’t in the script. I knew willow twigs would do this, but I’ve never seen it happen to hawthorn. Obviously, I can’t be doing with a hawthorn tree in my vegetable patch so I pulled it up and stuck it on the bonfire pile with everything else. And then, after a while, felt guilty and pulled it out again. It’s now stuck in the ground somewhere else where it can turn into a tree or not as it chooses. It’s hard to be ruthless with something so determined to go on living.

I’m not giving it a name, though. Because calling it Harry the hawthorn and getting all upset when itinevitably  succumbs to a late frost, or an early drought, or too much rain, or gales, or whatever, and dies would be silly.

Nope, I’m not getting fond of it at all.