STARLINGS

I am convinced that Mike Meyers based his Fat Bastard character on juvenile starlings.

I didn't like the character. It's one big fat joke that is played out over the course of more than one movie, and making fun of some of the most vulnerable people in our society is easy and mean. So I resent having to be reminded of this character several times a day.

The thing is that the baby starlings are not quite babies anymore. They have most of their feathers, although their heads are still a bit downy, and they can fly. They have discovered our bird feeder.

However, they haven't quite figured out yet how to EAT. Not for themselves. They know that food is something good and yummy, and that when they open their mouths and scream, food gets shoved in their faces.

So they fly over to the bird feeder and scream at the food.

They're just like Fat Bastard. "GET IN MY BELLY!" they scream, over and over.

I hope I am not giving you the wrong impression. There is nothing charming or cute about a bird haranguing a food item.

But there they scream. Sometimes an adult bird will fly over and eat as well. Most of the time, the adult birds ignore the juveniles, which are actually a bit bigger than the adults at this point (I think it might just be fluff). If this happens, the juveniles will peck the adults until they a) feed them, b) peck back, or c) fly off in a huff.

I no longer like starlings.

VERY BAD NEWS

So the other day, I discovered Langthorns Plantery.

I've seen the signs for it--it's off of the A120, which I often take to work. There are brown signs, the kind that are used for castles, rest areas, places of interest. I've wondered off and on what a "plantery" is, but as I only see the signs when I'm on my way to or from work, I've never dropped by, even though it's only about 15 minutes up the road.

So the other day, Mike and I were driving up to Oundle to spend the night in a haunted inn. We'd both taken the week off, and we decided that, instead of trekking off to some other country, we'd stay here and have a little mini-vacation by driving around to places nearby that we'd never been to.

When we passed the sign for Langthorns, I commented that I didn't know what a plantery was, but that it sounded intriguing. Mike helpfully commented that a plantery is probably somewhere that contains plants. He said that, as we were having a mini vacation and all, we could stop by there on our return. (Note: Willing offer, no coercion involved.)

This was a bad idea.

You know how sometimes you might be looking through some gardening magazine or the RHS Plants and Flowers guide, or looking at photos of a famous garden, and you see some plant that looks really nice, and you wonder what it is? So you look it up, and you find out that it's called something like meconopsis betonicifolia and you think, oh, I really would like to have that in my garden, and then you spend hours looking for some place that sells it and finally resort to paying some EXORBITANT PRICE ON EBAY AND WHEN IT ARRIVES IT'S NOT PACKED VERY WELL AND YOU HOPE IT LIVES.

Ahem.

To use a hypothetical example.

At any rate, odds are high Langthorns has it. And cheap. Not only did they have meconopsis (this is that lovely blue Tibetan poppy that is nearly impossible to grow from seed yourself--trust me on this one), but they had SEVERAL VARIETIES. For about £2.30 each, healthy little plants in 9 cm pots.

Mind you, they don't have a lot of the things you'd find in a...uh...garden-variety garden centre. There wasn't a pansy in the place. But that's good--places to buy pansies and pelargoniums (the geraniums we Americans think of when you say "geranium") and petunias and impatiens are a dime a dozen. But this is the kind of plant centre for the kind of gardener who would never buy anything in "assorted mix".

I was in heaven. Or maybe hell. You actually have to CHOOSE.

So that day, I walked away with a little meconopsis--a different variety than I had purchased from ebay--and a laburnum. I've been looking for a laburnum for ages. I think they must be fairly common, as I've gazed enviously at them in a few other people's gardens, but I could not for the life of me find one.

At any rate, I went back on Saturday, and bought enough trees and shrubs to fill out the rest of my borders, and quite a few herbaceous perennials to go around them. I can't get over how cheap their plants are for what they are. Your basic philadelphus, which is a more common shrub over here (they have something like 7 varieties), sells for £6 for a large plant. The more unusual things might cost you as much as £15.

Saturday was my day to walk through and browse. It's still late spring, in that kind of middle period where the spring-flowering trees have mostly lost their flowers, but the summer-flowering perennials haven't filled out yet, so browsing meant mostly getting things I knew or looking them up in the RHS guide which I brought with me. Then I came home, went through my gardening books and wrote down everything I wanted, compared it to their catalogue, and went back on Sunday armed with a list.

They had almost all of it.

You know what this means, don't you? I don't know if my relationship can withstand this kind of stress. As it was, when I came back on Saturday, Mike asked me how many plants I'd gotten, and I said, "I don't know...four shrubs and somewhere between 8 and 10 other plants...."

He asked if this was anything like my usual estimates when coming back from garden centres. I insisted that, although I hadn't been counting, I was absolutely certain there were only about 10, which, including the shrubs, would make a total of 12-14 plants.

He promptly ran out and counted them, looked at me accusingly, and said, "Twenty. There are twenty."

He said that I was off by 50%, as 2x7=14 and 3x7=21. I countered that it was more like 30%, as 14 was almost 15, and 3x5=15 and 4x5=20. Out came the calculators.

I'll save you the math. It's 42%.

How will we ever survive?