Week 20.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Another Transformation

A fortnight ago I wrote in this blog about the way in which my friends Janet and Rodney Thomas had transformed a small corner of Jaywick into a horticultural work of art. Last week I commented on plans to convert parts of Manchester’s public parks into orchards and herb gardens, humming with honeybees.

Then, on the Saturday of the Mayday Bank Holiday weekend, with my younger son Andy and daughter-in-law Marilyn, I visited the Beth Chatto Gardens, off the A133 Clacton to Colchester Road about a quarter of a mile on the Clacton side of Elmstead Market. Since 1960 (which seems just a short while ago to me!) what was an overgrown wasteland has been transformed into the heart of gardens that attract thousands of visitors every year. They have earned Beth Chatto, their creator, an OBE for services to horticulture, an honorary doctorate at Essex University and a number of prestigious horticultural awards.

This was the raw material; I quote from the official guide book; ‘In a shallow depression of some three or four acres there was a totally overgrown wilderness tucked between two farms. A few fine oaks and hollies rose above a tangle of willow, blackthorn and bramble, while buried in the centre was a spring-fed ditch. The surrounding land provided arid gravel facing south-west while the opposite north-east facing slope had a cool water-retaining silt shaded by a few ancient boundary oaks'.

Part of the Water Gardens, once the overgrown wilderness described above

This former wilderness now comprises the Water Gardens, with three lakes and surrounding trees and shrubs, situated in a sheltered valley reminiscent of the fictional Shangri La. Now there is also the Gravel Garden, never irrigated and rendered colourful with plants that can survive in near-desert conditions, a Scree Garden, a Reservoir Garden, an area of woodland, and a nursery and garden centre. Yes – and there’s a welcoming café there too!


















A close-up and a 'landscape' in the gardens

There's a roomy car park with ample grassy area for family picnics. Admission to the gardens costs £5. They are open to the public from 9 a.m. till 5 p.m. from March till October and from 9 a.m. till 4.00 p.m. from November till February. The Gardens have been closed on Sundays in the past but are currently open to the public on Sundays from 10a.m till 5p.m.

Beth Chatto’s gardens, often featuring in tv gardening programmes, are a horticultural treat that no Tendring resident and no visitor to the Essex holiday coast should miss.

Two forthcoming elections

Local elections (for parish, district and county councils) are usually held early in May of the year in which they are due. This year’s County Council elections are an exception. The European Parliamentary elections, also due, are to be held Europe-wide in June. It is obviously sensible to hold both elections on the same day, so on 4th June Essex voters will decide who is to represent them both at the Council Chamber in Chelmsford and at the European Parliament.

Westleigh House, Carnarvon Road, Clacton-on-Sea was once (when I was Housing Manager) the home of Clactons’s Housing Department. Now it is the Headquarters of Tendring District’s legal services, which include electoral registration and the conduct of elections.

You will only be able to vote if your name is included on the electoral register. If you have only recently moved to your present home, it may not be. Check at your local Council Offices. Tendring residents should call at Westleigh House, Carnarvon Road, Clacton, or phone the helpline 01255 686586 to check that they are registered. Citizens of other EU countries resident in Britain are also entitled to vote in these elections. I know that there are a number of Poles resident and working in the Clacton area. They too, and any other EU nationals living and working in the area should check that they are registered in the same way, at the earliest possible opportunity.

Some local residents may well be taking early holidays from the beginning of June. If because of that, or for any other reason, you expect to be unable to vote in person on 4th June you can apply for a postal vote by contacting the electoral registration office of your local district or borough council, in the Tendring area at Westleigh House, also as soon as possible!

Incidentally if, because of age, infirmity, business commitments, or any other reason, you might always find it difficult or impossible to get to the polling station on voting day, you can arrange permanently to vote by post. I did this myself three or four years ago and have found that I always receive my ballot papers in plenty of time to record and post off my vote.

Possibly, of course, you are disillusioned with the main political parties and don’t intend to vote at either of these elections. That is your privilege, but it is a privilege that if you exercise too often could end with your not being able to vote at all. It was out of disillusionment with existing parties that Hitler and his Nazis were able to seize power in Germany in the 1930s.

If there is no-one that you feel you can vote for, perhaps there will be candidates that you would like to vote against. I haven’t yet decided which political party I shall vote for on 4th June. However, as my politics are certainly not of the far right, and I believe that Britain’s best future lies within a politically and economically united Europe, I may decide to vote tactically in order to keep BNP and UKIP representatives out of both the Council Chamber in Chelmsford and the Parliament in Brussels.

I told you so!

It is very satisfying to find that a conviction that has been held for many years, for no other reason than the instinctive feeling that it is right, is held firmly by other people for strong, and easily understood, reasons.

I have long believed that a wide gap between the very richest and the very poorest people in a civilised Christian country is a thoroughly bad and shameful thing, and that a primary duty of every government with the well-being of the whole nation at heart should be to narrow that gap. I have expressed that belief many times in Tendring Topics both on Line and in Print, most recently in my comments on the Government’s Budget.

Perhaps I first picked up the idea as a little Anglican choirboy when, on every Sunday evening I sang the Magnificat, the Blessed Virgin Mary’s song of triumph and thanksgiving, at ‘Evensong’:

‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away’.

All of that sounded a very good idea to me. Later, when I read Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village I felt that he was expressing a similar idea in his couplet:

Ill fares the land, to hastening woes a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

Now, in a book review in The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, I have discovered kindred spirits who have the same conviction as myself but, unlike me, have found solid, practical reasons for holding it.

The book is The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, published by Allen Lane at £20.00.

The reviewer, Richard Wilkinson, a member of central Manchester Quaker Meeting, writes that the authors have written a book that is lucid, approachable and wonderfully timely. It cries out for a coalition of supporters to persuade government to put its thesis into practice. He goes on to say:

The principal thesis is extraordinarily simple: as national income increases beyond the level of general sufficiency it ceases to increase human well-being. What does affect well-being in wealthier countries is the degree in which they are more or less equal. What is astonishing is the closeness of the fit.

The authors are able to demonstrate that the most unequal countries (generally the USA, the UK and Portugal) have a higher percentage of teenage births, worse life expectancy, higher incidence of drug misuse, mental health problems, obesity, more violence and much higher rates of imprisonment. To cap it all the most unequal countries have lower levels of trust in people and much less sense of community…………
……….The authors write with restraint and without much overt emotion. Perhaps that allows the revolutionary implications of their work to develop progressively and emerge with great power.

Lessons that are to be learned are, First, that the best thing governments in the UK can do to combat our many social ills is to diminish income inequality. Secondly, that the greater sense of community and trust in more equal societies makes them better fitted to facing up to the challenges of climate change and the move to steady-state economy.

This is a book that should surely be read by all politicians. It provides an explanation of the causes of the ‘broken society’ to which David Cameron has referred, and offers a means of healing that society, and cleansing it of its many ills.

It is a long time since I have spent £20 on a new book! I certainly intend to buy this one though. Blog readers can expect some more quotes from it in the future.