welsh hills again

I am keeping the project up but with a lot of time spent with older daughter and family and younger daughter and hers  I need to catch up with documenting it! It is an amazing day here in North Wales.  This was the view when I opened the kitchen door this morning and it has stayed pretty much like this all day.  The forecast for the rest of this week is similar so this is a time to appreciate how beautiful it is and to sit on the sense that everywhere needs watering!  Of course it does, we can't have everything! Today's task was just a little one: to cut down the sweet cicely before it seeds all over the place.  Sweet cicely is a  very beautiful thing and while it is flower I love it for the foam of white and the scent.  The plant has a sweet, faintly aniseedy flavour to my palate, and can be used in cooking instead of sugar for things like pies and tarts.  But when it finishes flowering and goes to seed it will seed itself abso...

Every day I have done a small thing in the garden, unless I have been away in which case I have tried to give it some thought.  The greatest difference it is making at the moment is to the way I notice it.  A peony opening, a bit of bindweed twining through the salvias, a tiny bluetit chirping in the hedge: there is something about the daily engagement which makes me see it all. Today I have put geraniums in the pots by the holiday cottage door and begun to seriously harden off the cosmos seedlings which I bought from Sarah Raven. I whisked through the side garden removing tiny heads of nettles which were poking up between the hardy geraniums.  Then I sat for a few minutes, listening to the garden, birds and pollinators and the distant hum of my neighbour's tractor. From my seat the alliums and the orange geum clash gloriously. Looking back towards the house, more alliums are clashing with the smyrnium and the side garden is only days away from erupting int...

I haven't had such a long break since I started blogging.  I would be hard pushed to explain why it is several weeks since I blogged.  Nothing terrible has happened.  I haven't moved house or continent.  I have just been ridiculously,overwhelmingly busy, rushing up and down the country and, for the first time since my mother died, having a serious go at falling back in love with the garden. That has meant hours weeding and cutting back and trying to uncover the garden again after a year of neglect.  I even went to the Chelsea Flower Show, thanks to the kindness of a friend in sharing some corporate hospitality with me.  There has been a funeral, time spent with all four of our children and our grandchildren, time spent with my father.  Hours and hours in the car.   Whizz, whizz, all a blur. Time to slow down, time to reflect. This is The Beauty of Islam garden by Kamelia Bin Zaal.   Interestingly, when I saw it, although  I was st...

So after the upheaval of Beth Chatto's garden, would Hyde Hall be the disappointment instead?  I am a westerly and northerly living person.  London is familiar territory but outside the city I feel at home in Devon and Wales and the North West of England.  East is a bit alien to me.  I have been to Rosemoor in Devon a number of times and to Harlow Carr in Yorkshire.  I liked Harlow Carr, loved parts of Rosemoor, and made a rushed and disappointing trip to Wisley .  I don't know whether the disappointment was a result of the rush and I won't find out until I have the opportunity to go again. So Hyde Hall was off my patch.  I knew very little about it.  I had no real expectations.  I remembered something about the garden specialising in plants for drier conditions and I thought Matthew Wilson had been curator of the garden in the early 2000s  but that was about it .  Both of those things made me inclined to be interested in it but...

In May the weather took off and with it my garden: weeds, flowers, grass, everything suddenly galloping for the sky. Suddenly everything is lush and full.  I looked back to last year's end of month view for May (this is one of the great things about this idea!) to see if my sense of an extra richness this year is borne out. It is perhaps harder to tell in comparison with a smaller picture and enlarging the photo to the size I am using this year makes it lose focus.  The hardy geraniums were further on last year (the faithful Johnson's blue is at the front) but the biggest difference this year is the alliums. Last autumn I planted fifty allium Purple Sensation from Peter Nyssen in the side garden, split between the two beds.  And they are a sensation and even fifty is not enough.   In the autumn I will put some more in. This is a good time of year in the side garden.  The day lilies are just about to open and the oriental poppies are ready to...

So much dry weather and, over the last few days, so much wind.  With our stony free draining soil my garden is desperate for rain.  Today we will do things in order.  Come out of the kitchen door with me and turn left into the side garden.  Ignore, if you can, the lengths of cast iron guttering piled on the rotting table, waiting to be painted and giving a gentle air of Steptoe and Son to the area by the door. Here is the side garden, oddly quiet and green just now.  The hellebores are still holding on to their flowers in the foreground but the daffodils and tulips have all gone over and the peonies and the oriental poppies which will be the next overflowing of colour have not yet started. So most of what is happening is foliage: fennel and hellebore and dicentra here.   For the first time that I can remember it was obvious today that the hellebores and peonies were wilting in the searing wind, after weeks of dry weather.  I always mulch in ...