by Derek Tangye
Leaves are equally liable to damage and there is also a period during the season when they are often in short supply, and then we use ivy leaves in their place. This shortage, except when frost has done its harm, is due to a natural pause in the life of the plant, and it will occur once, or perhaps twice, during the October to April flowering season; the leaves go small like buttons, and yellow, and the crown of the plant is bared to the sky and for a week or two it seems as if the plant is dead; and then miraculously, little green shoots thrust upwards followed by the pinpoints of the buds, and soon the plants are in bloom again.
In the beginning I used to help Jeannie with the bunching, but my laborious efforts, my groans as I fumbled with the stalks which swivelled this way and that in my fingers, became a handicap to her enthusiasm. She was so fast and I was so slow that I was like a runner who is lapped several times in a race; and her bunches were so much better than mine. I have seen professional violet bunchers who work at great speed show no regard as to the final look of the bunches; they gather the required number of blooms, add the leaves, slip on the rubber bands, and that, as far as they are concerned, is another bunch ready for market. Jeannie works as fast but she arranges every bloom to face the same way, so that when you hold up the bunch all the violets are looking at you, wide open like miniature pansies.
There is an art, too, in packing them in the flower boxes. First, however, after being bunched, their heads are dipped in water and the bunches are left overnight in jars filled to the brim with water; violets revel in wet and, as they drink through their petals, they will survive for days if they are dipped regularly. The bunches are packed tightly in the boxes but the number depends on whether they have short or long stalks, which in turn depends on whether it is cold or mild weather; when they are short Jeannie packs forty-two bunches, when long, thirty bunches; and she lays them on white tissue paper, the ends of which are folded over to cover the blooms before putting on the top. Then off the boxes go in the Land Rover to Penzance station and from there on the flower train to whichever market we have decided on; and in two or three days the price returns arrive through the post and we open the envelope in excitement. ‘Sixpence!’ I shout with delight. Or gloomily I murmur: ‘Only threepence.’
It is a depressing experience, an experience which sets the mood for the day, when a box of flowers we have admired, which has caused Jeannie to shout from the flower house: ‘You must come and see these before I put the top on . . . they’re so beautiful!’ – when such a box fetches a poor price. We feel cheated and angry, and we curse the salesman, and I scribble a note of complaint. Or we say stoutly: ‘We won’t send to that market again.’ Just like the potatoes, just like anything else a market gardener grows . . . once a product is away from the packing shed it becomes a ticket in a lottery. Yet, as there is no alternative, as it is far too complicated a business to sell direct to retailers, one has to learn, like growing old, to accept the situation. We now accept it by sending our flowers regularly to the same salesman season after season. We send to Clifford Cowling at Leeds, the Dan Wuille Group, a firm in Birmingham and to Carlo Naef, the Italian-born doyen of Covent Garden salesmen. They receive between them the whole range of our present-day output—violets, anemones, daffodils, freesias, wallflowers, forget-me-nots, calendulas, polyanthus, Christmas flowering stocks; and if sometimes their price returns disappoint, enraging us, we have to admit to ourselves that they too are at the mercy of the same flighty mistress; the mysterious, intangible, elusive ‘supply and demand’.
The first winter I cared not a rap for such economic factors because my imagination did not wish to grasp the prospect that they would ever beset me. I was doped by the sheer pleasure of being a peasant; by the plodding work that did not require mental activity; by day-end exhaustion that did not repay with worried, sleepless nights; by the pleasure of achievement after I had defeated the wind and the rain, and the baskets were filled with violets.
Physical effort is so much more gentle than that of the mind and, being new to it, I found it more rewarding. Mine was the pleasure of the mountaineer, the Channel swimmer or the marathon runner – enthusiasm allied with determination that brought victory which is sweet to the senses and provided tangible conquest in a personal battle. I was blessed at the time by the simple belief that flower growing was determined by obeying certain well-defined rules, and success was automatic for him who did so; manure the ground, for instance, see there is enough lime, stick the plants in at the right time, and so on. I had, of course, to work hard and be ready to accept advice from experienced growers whenever I was in doubt, and pick their brains whenever I had the chance. I had, in fact, to behave like any intelligent man with initiative, and my reward would be flowers in abundance. I had not the slightest conception of the savage surprises ahead of me, nor of the bewildering contradictions that growing provides. Quite early on, during that first winter, however, my education was to begin.
The Princess of Wales had already disappeared and now the Governor Herrick started to look anaemic; and instead of lush green plants cascading violet blooms like those of my neighbours, they resembled row upon row of pale-faced schoolboys in need of a holiday. The stalks were short, the length of my thumb; the blooms were like pinpoints and the petals unwilling to open; and the leaves were grey-green and crinkly.
I am giving the wrong impression. They never at any time looked bursting with life, but a philosophy of wishful thinking convinced me they were certain to improve; and only the departure of autumn forced me to admit that something was radically wrong. My best week’s picking had been twenty-four dozen bunches; and in view of the number of plants we had it should have been three times that number. ‘What’s wrong with the violets?’ I said at last to Tommy. I was often to be amazed how Tommy, who was so intelligent on many subjects, was so ignorant on matters that directly concerned his profession; or perhaps his profession was to make use of his strength, leaving questions of skill to his bosses. ‘They look sick,’ was all the answer he could give me.
I had, I now realise, a childlike faith in the wisdom of those who lived close to the soil; and it never seemed possible to me that nature often defeated them. However, it never occurred to me, until experience proved it, that growers, like all experts, frequently offered advice that was diametrically opposite in its content. There was another occasion in another year when our violet runners failed from the beginning to take a grip with their roots; and I travelled the district, samples of dead runners in my hand, seeking an answer to the mystery.
Surely, I said to myself, these people who have been growing violets all their lives will be able to give me the answer; and yet each advanced a different theory none of which, as I learnt later, was the right one. I found out on my own that the damage had been inflicted by myself; in an effort to provide special food for each runner, I had dropped a handful of blood and bone mixture in each hole as I planted them, and this had burnt and killed the fibre roots.
As for the Governor Herrick, one man said the runners must have come from stock which had become exhausted, another that I could not have put any manure in the ground (I had put plenty of fish manure), and another that the wind had stunted the plants. Jeannie and I came to the conclusion that the latter explanation was the most likely one and we decided, after much discussion, to invest £30 in coconut netting and posts. The gesture, however, had a feeble result. It was too late. If a winter flowering plant of any kind has not become firmly established by early autumn, there is nothing you can do afterwards to bring it to life.
I have learnt now – and how costly the lessons have been – that you must anticipate trouble if you are to be a successful grower; you must be an optimist in the long term, a pessimist in the short, and you must be perpetually on guard against sudden attack by the elements, insects and diseases that are always in waiting to catch you off your guard.
Along the bank above the Governor Herrick we had planted an assortment of daffodils which had come from Gordon
Gibson, a famous grower in the Scilly Islands who was an old friend of Jeannie’s family. It was not an ideal position for they faced the full blast of a Lizard wind, but we were short of space and the prize position in the wood had been given to 5 cwt. of King Alfred and 2 cwt. of Soleil d’Or. Nor for that matter were they fashionable daffodils; for daffodils like everything else can outlive popularity. We were, however, only too pleased to have them because we could not afford a stock of up-to-date bulbs, and any bulbs were better than none.
Each variety had arrived in the autumn with meticulous explanations from Gibson as to how they would look when the time came to bloom: Hospodar, for instance, coloured best when grown slowly in an open cool situation and would then have a deep orange-red centre – in a warm season the colour would be poor; Campernelle, according to Gibson, was a dainty yellow scented jonquil, a lot of which could be packed in a box; Bernardino was white with a heavily frilled cup edged with apricot; Croesus was a mid-season variety with an orange-red cup; Coverack Glory was a strong-growing scented daffodil with a yellow trumpet. We were bewitched by these descriptions. We forgave the failure of the Governor Herrick in anticipation of this harvest of daffodils.
The first to bloom were the Soleil d’Or in the wood, and the first Sol in any year is a breathtaking moment that lifts the soul on a pinnacle, leaving it there high in the air to contemplate in exultation the wonder of the coming spring. This particular Sol appeared on a late January day, after a harassing morning during which, in our ignorance, we thought we had lost both the Soleil d’Or and all the King Alfred. During the night there had been a hard frost and when we went into the wood after breakfast we found the leaves and the stems quite flat – as if a roller had been driven over the meadow. It was a bitter moment. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that looks like the end of our daffodil crop.’ But I was wrong and it took only a few hours for me to know it; for as the day brightened so did the leaves and stems recover, and then suddenly we saw among the beds of the Soleil d’Or that solitary bloom; a button of yellow too beautiful to pick, its delicate scent touching the cold air like a feather.
Sols, like the early scented Scilly Whites, do not bloom uniformly, so unless you grow a large quantity you can never at one time send away in great numbers; their season protracts over weeks. King Alfreds, on the other hand, once a few blooms have heralded the way, rush in together crowding the meadow with buds. That first year they took us by surprise.
One day at the end of February we had picked a handful, the next I was lugging two baskets back to the cottage. ‘Heavens,’ I said to Jeannie, ‘look at all these . . . and we haven’t done a bunch in our lives!’
The remedy was to fetch our old friend Tom Bailey from Lamorna; here was a man who would not laugh at our enthusiasm nor our innocence. ‘Tom,’ I said, ‘we’ve grown the flowers and now we haven’t the slightest idea how to send them away!’ I had found him bunching his own daffodils but he showed no irritation at the interruption. ‘We’ll soon put that right,’ he grinned, ‘come on, take me up to Minack and I’ll show you.’
He was a good teacher because he had a high standard. There are many daffodil growers who seem to have no standards at all, no pride in a beautifully packed box; who bunch blooms however badly marked, jamming them into old cardboard boxes and wrapping them in newspapers if paper at all; farmers, for instance, who during the war and afterwards cashed in on the shortage of daffodils, growing them as if they were a field of turnips.
I once called on a farmer who showed me an outhouse filled with a white variety of daffodil standing in jars on the shelves with the petals stained the colour of autumn leaves. ‘Caught the wind,’ I said sympathetically, knowing that if they were mine they would all be thrown away. ‘Damn nuisance,’ he replied, adding blandly, ‘I’m afraid it may affect the price.’
The reward for maintaining a high standard comes usually when the markets are glutted with daffodils; and then buyers will ignore the rag and bobtail senders and stick to those whose standards are known. Our own aim is to send every box away from Minack as if it were going to an exhibition; and it is an aim that can only be achieved by having, at times, to dump large quantities of daffodils on the compost heap.
We ran into no trouble with those first King Alfreds, the weather was brisk but there were no strong winds to break the barrage of the wood and hurt them: and we picked when the buds had dipped at right angles to the stems and had begun to open, the yellow just showing. We brought them into the spare bedroom which Jeannie and her typewriter now vacated, and stood them in galvanised flower pails, perhaps for two days, until the bud had formed its full beauty. Then we bunched them in twelves, finding the long firm stems easy to hold and arrange, boxed them in a bed of white paper a dozen bunches at a time, and then sent them off to Honor Bannerman, the head florist at the Savoy, who paid us a price far above anything we would have received in an ordinary market.
This, we said to each other, was a fine way of earning a living; and we had the further satisfaction of hearing of a man who so admired a bunch he bought at the stand in the Savoy’s front hall, that he enquired where they came from, then ordered ten dozen to be sent to his friends. Pride, therefore, was mingled with the pleasure of profit; for we had found that in a fortnight’s hectic activity we had earned enough to cover the capital outlay of the bulbs, and the bulbs were still there for many seasons to come. ‘Just think,’ I said to Jeannie with the gambler’s aptitude to tot up prospective wins, ‘we have taken £56 from 5 cwt. of bulbs . . . seven tons fill an acre, so if we could raise the capital to have that amount, we could earn over £1,500 a year!’
There was the beauty of the work as well. Tiredness, as known in other spheres, had no chance to conquer when the senses were being constantly refreshed by the tangible evidence of spring. Each morning we would enter the wood, then stop and marvel before we began to pick. Overnight buds had dropped, opened and were peering their golden yellow over the green foliage, each with a destiny to provide delight. It was like a ballroom of child dancers, innocent and exquisite, brimmed with an ethereal happiness, laughing, loving, blind to passing time; and yet, almost unnoticed, day by day the flowers were leaving, then gathering speed, until suddenly there was only a floor of green, flecked here and there by a bloom that had stayed behind. The dance was over.
Along the bank in the field the Campernelle were flowering and beside them the Hospodar were thick with buds. Campernelle, Hospodar, Coverack Glory, Bernardino, Croesus . . . they would flower in that order, the poor relations of the King Alfred. We would not dare to despatch them to the Savoy, and we would take the luck of the markets; and yet we still had the advantage of being so far west that each variety would flower early, earlier than Lamorna, earlier than Coverack, earlier than Falmouth.
We were well satisfied with the shilling a bunch the Campernelle were fetching as thirty-six bunches were packed in a box; and then followed the Hospodar, first an odd bloom or two and suddenly a rush, stems clawing the air with nodding buds, a concourse of faces crowding the bank; and no sooner had these appeared than the Coverack Glory a little further down the field nearer the sea began drooping their yellow heads, demanding the attention we were giving to the others.
Up to then – it was the second week of March – the weather had been soft and warm, so gentle the wind one could not believe the gales of winter had ever existed, or could ever come again. Our only concern was to pick, bunch and send away. We had no time to anticipate trouble. We listened to the weather forecast but day after day it was so monotonously the same that there came an evening when we did not bother to turn on the wireless. The sky was clear, the sea still, and there was a pleasant security in the quietness, lulling us early to bed and quickly to sleep.
Suddenly I was wakened by a crash, and in the dimness I saw the curtains billowing before the open window like a sail torn from the mast. I fumbled for my torch and at the same time Jeannie cried out: ‘My face cream! That was my new bottle of Dorothy Gray I left by the win
dow!’
I had time neither to sympathise, laugh nor investigate the damage. It was the Lizard wind hissing through the trees, tearing into the daffodils that were scheduled to be picked in the morning.
‘Hurry,’ I said, ‘we must get down to the field . . .’ and we pulled on our clothes and in a few minutes were fighting, heads down, against a gale that was to roar across Mount’s Bay without pause for thirty-six hours. Our task was absurd, but ignorance at first made it appear feasible, the comfortable optimism at the beginning of a battle, the sheer stupidity of believing we could conquer the elements.
We had one torch which Jeannie held as I grabbed at the waving stems, and unable to stand in the screaming wind we crawled on our hands and knees up and down the paths between the beds. For ten minutes we fought with the Hospodar and then, only a handful picked, I yelled at Jeannie: ‘It’s hopeless here . . . let’s try the Coverack Glory!’ Down we staggered to the lower part of the field and the beam of the torch shone on a sight which resembled a herd of terrified miniature animals tethered to the ground. Spray was now sticking to our faces and our hands, and a sense of doom was enveloping our hearts. We could not win. Nothing we could do would save our harvest.
9
Fish boats call the Lizard wind the starving wind, for the fish hide from it on the bed of the sea and the boats return empty to port. Landsmen solemnly call it the gizzard wind as it bites into the body and leaves you tired when the day is still young. It is a hateful wind, no good to anybody, drying the soil into powdery dust, blackening the grass like a film of oil, punching the daffodils with the blows of a bully. It is seldom a savage wind as it was on the night it destroyed the Hospodar and Coverack Glory; if it were, if it spat its venom then recoiled into quiet, you could cry over the damage and forget. Instead it simmers its fury like a man with a grudge, moaning its grievance on and on, day after day, remorselessly wearying its victims into defeat.
