I met Mr McGregor today, and honestly he’s not looking a day over a hundred! A quick check of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, first written by Beatrix Potter in 1893, would make it fair to assume the grumpy gardener would have been about fifty, which would put the keeper of the gardens at about 180 now! All these years later he is still having trouble with rabbits. Mr McGregor has though moved from the English Lake District to South Cambridgeshire.
Today the Ickleton Allotment Association held their Produce Show. The sun gods shone. A slight breeze rippled across the rows, some tidier than others. Feathery carrot fronds leant into each other in a game of Chinese whispers. Plump purple grapes swung heavy on the vine, and enormous pumpkins slouched on the dry earth. Giant sunflowers stood tall and nodded benignly to the people passing below them. Dahlias and daisies, and lavender, and roses all flounced in the best dressed category. Not to mention all the other flowers I couldn’t name. More used to tropical gardening, I am adrift in a seed catalogue full of flowers with which I am not familiar.
All manner of huts and sheds stand sentry to the individual allotments and the produce grown yards away, but hidden by a narrow copse, from the roar of traffic along the M11. Not having grown up in England, my assumption that allotments were the purview of cantankerous women wearing tweed skirts and elderly pipe-smoking gents stomping about in Wellington boots has been shattered. There wasn’t a tweed cap, let alone a skirt, in sight. Nor did a hint of tobacco twitch my nostrils. (Unlike my early morning walks along Altoona Lagoon on St Croix when a lungful of wacky baccy breathed in as I passed the fishermen would help me around the circuit.)
The produce-for-sale table held pots of herbs, chutneys and jams. Some of the latter I felt sure had made-up names. I mean, really, who has ever heard of Jumbleberry Jam? I have been assured it is an accepted monicker and, as you would expect, comprises any number of summer berries. I bought a jar. And one of elderflower jam. And a jar of honey, but only after trying three different types.
And then the produce-to-peruse table – the one that the judges saunter down tutting and taking notes, then deciding on the winners. Flowers and fruits, runner beans and other beans, Roma, vine and cherry toms, and the oddest shaped pumpkins and squash. Some would not need to be carved for Halloween, they look pretty ghoulish already, although the Turban pumpkin rather took my fancy.
On my return home, I looked up the National Allotment Society (NAS) and learned it really is a big deal in that they work to ‘uphold and preserve the rights of the allotment community’ across the land. In fact, the NAS is under the patronage of His Royal Highness King Charles III who, as I’m sure you will remember, was at one stage mocked for talking to plants and promoting a kinder kind of living. How prescient he was. The King has always been, and continues to be, keen to protect Britain’s traditions, and allotment gardening falls firmly into that realm.
The Ickleton Allotment Association is chaired not by an irascible Mr McGregor look-alike but by a tanned and friendly chap perhaps in his forties, not a grey hair to be seen, and no pipe. Children darted around, men and women of all ages ambled along the lanes between the marked out allotments, ducked under awnings to admire the produce on show to salivate at a cake oozing raspberries and jam – grown and produced in situ. Or perhaps a bacon buttie hot off the grill had more appeal. Or sausage rolls. Or scones and strawberries and cream. My basket began to weigh me down. I have hopes the apples being grown on one allotment will produce a glass of cider at next year’s produce show!
The event, the people milling around, some even hatless, seemed a quintessential British tradition. It was gentle. It was fun. It made me glad to be in England. And now, having escaped Mr McGregor, I think I shall, like Peter Rabbit, have a cup of chamomile tea.