welsh hills again

This has been an odd summer and not only because of the weather.  I don't do very personal writing on this blog because it is far from anonymous and anyway I am not someone who shares very personal things a lot in ordinary life.  Sometimes I read deeply revelatory blogs which share intimate feelings about the writer's life and their family and friends.  They are always weirdly compelling but they also make me feel pretty uncomfortable.  What if your mother in law finds out you think she is an evil old bat?  What if the doctor's receptionist knows you think she is a little Hitler or your best friend discovers that you have told the world that her late night phone calls drive you nuts?  I think the people you love and live with deserve some privacy and while I might tell you what they had for tea and whether they like fires because I am pretty sure they wouldn't mind my doing so, I wouldn't share anything very intimate.  So suffice it to say that this has been a summe

I have spent a bit of time looking at the side garden and musing about what has worked, what hasn't and what progress I have made here.  It is a garden which I began in the spring of 2009.  The blog ended up as such a lot of pictures and writing that I have gone back to using a blog which I set up in 2009 to keep track of what I was doing.   Keeping Track of the Garden is here if you want a look! I have changed back to the old template by the way as so many people again had a problem with Dynamic Views.  Hope that's easier!

I love bonfires.  When I was a child I loved fireworks too.  Now I can take them or leave them but a good fire is a wonderful thing.    We had a fire in the field the other night.  We had been piling wood up for a couple of weeks, prunings of shrubs, trimmings of the native hedges, brambles and bits of holly cut back from behind the shepherd's hut.    The woodpile was ready to light and the pallet was covered with perennial weed to burn when things got really hot. It was a pitchblack night, cold and wet with gusts of rain blowing  out of the darkness, snatching at the fire and hurling flame and smoke back into the blackness. Standing on the doorstep it was the kind of night to drive you back inside but we gathered our coats around us and set out across the black field.  Soon the centre of the fire was a mesmerising glow. Gusts of wind made it roar into sheets of flame.  Our faces were hot although the rain blew cold on our backs.  Ian patrolled the fire with his pitc

The end of month view for October is a depressing sight.  In fact it is so depressing that my laptop seems to have lost the pictures.  If I can raise the enthusiasm I will go round again but in the meantime I can give you a verbal picture: blown over, brown, grey and green, tatty, floppy, flattened. There is a lot still to do in the garden but I am suffering from my usual response to putting the clocks back: I want to stay in and keep warm.  I have managed to plant out practically all of two hundred new daffodil bulbs which I had ordered and I have some bare rooted plants coming this month so will have to force myself away from the fire to get them in but in the meantime I am ignoring the falling over fennel and the shabby Shasta daisies and getting excited about blankets instead. These are the new daffodils, to add to the thousands I have already: February Gold Actaea Pueblo Thalia Peeping Jenny All the images are from Peter Nyssen 's catalogue.  I us