welsh hills again

I never garden in winter.  I can't really see the point of winter gardens with dogwoods and snowdrops even though I have plenty of both.  In winter I come inside and read and knit and crochet and write.  I hate getting cold and wet in the garden and I quite like it every year when the time comes when everything stops growing and there is nothing I can do.  It is done for another year.  Close the door, light the lamps, pull your chair to the fire. This year however I have turned my back on the garden in a big way.  Usually in winter I do at least some thinking and dreaming.  By January I am starting to engage with the idea of gardening and I might read about gardens or spend time making up plant lists or musing about what to do in one area or another.  This year I did none of that.  I had lost my gardening mojo.  I had fallen out of love. I think there were two strands to that.  One was the extent to which over the late summer an...

Some people won't go back to a place they loved as a child.  What if the cavernous green darkness with a warren of tunnels in which you built a den and spent all day hidden from view is just a gap in a rather scrubby  patch of rhododendron?  What if the apple tree you climbed and watched the world from has been taken down and the field turned into a carpark?  I felt a bit the same about going to Beth Chatto 's garden.  Might it  be better not to risk disappointment? I seem to have been reading Beth Chatto's books all my serious gardening life, from the time when the children were old enough for swings and footballs to be banned from the garden and the children sent to the park.  What an innocent time that seems now.  I suppose they must have been about nine years old, the same sort of age they were when they started going to school and the local shops by themselves.  Would that happen now or would they be kept close to home with trampolines...

Tomorrow I am having a few days away with Karen and Linda  going garden visiting.  We did this last year in Devon.  We went to The Garden House , Rosemoor , Glebe Cottage and Wildside .  We talked gardens, walked gardens and were cheerfully obsessive.  There was no need to worry about boring a non-gardening friend by taking too long or taking too many pictures.  It was bliss. This year we are going to see Beth Chatto's garden and the RHS garden at Hyde Hall.  I can't wait!  I have been reading Beth Chatto's books all my gardening  life and she has shaped the way I approach the challenges of my soil and my site in a way which no one else has.  My obsession with growing what wants to be here is fed by frequent references to her "Gravel Garden" and "Woodland Garden" books.  I am fascinated to see what grows without watering in her dry Essex garden.  We must have more rain here in Wales but plants that do best for me put down lo...