Lenz Grimmer's blog

Yesterday was a holiday in Germany (Pentecost), and again the weather was quite miserable, considering that it's June already. Nevertheless I spent some time in the garden, removing all withered flower clusters from the rhododendron bushes - this is called dead-heading and supposedly improves blooming in the following year. I also noticed that one of our bamboo bushes (fargesia nitida) has bloomed, which is a pretty rare case (for some species, this happens only once every 120 years)  but unfortunately also means that all bamboos of this species will bloom and die afterwards. I have already seen the same happening in several other gardens around Hamburg and spotted several postings from other bamboo fans in different forums. Looks like it's time to cut it down and dig out the roots.

The long weekend ended with a blast - yesterday I went to a Depeche Mode "Touring the Angel" Open Air Concert which took place in the Weserstadium in Bremen. The event was sold out and around 40.000 people were there to celebrate. I hadn't seen DM performing live before (except for video recordings), even though I am a great fan of them since the early eighties. It was awesome - they played a very good mixture of old and new material, including one of my personal favourites from their early days: "Photographic". It seems that I was lucky with my choice of location right in front of the stage - I did not experience any of the sound problems that many people reported on the german DM website. And the atmosphere there was great, too - people danced, clapped and cheered like mad, including me! And I guess I was also lucky to not have parked close to the stadium - the traffic around the arena came to a grinding halt after the event...

All in all I really enjoyed it - too bad it was over way too quickly!