welsh hills again

It is May.  Is there any month more beautiful?  I have been making a new herb bed in the kitchen garden, digging out an area which has become full of grass and ground elder.  At this time of year you could work in the garden all day long and still not finish what is to be done so if we are to seize the moment it is important not to fall prey to the endless to do list, either written or mental.  It is important to seize the day. We walk up the drive, through the farmyard and out onto the hill.  Cowslips are blooming at the edge of the drive.  In Welsh they are called Briallen Fair, Mary's primrose.   A little colony of these was growing up here when we came nearly twelve years ago now.  For a few years they appeared every spring, the patch never really growing.  Then a couple of years ago they took off and began to spread.  Now there is an area perhaps six feet long crowded with them.  Unlike primroses, they hold their heads hig...

On Saturday two men arrived and knocked all the plaster off our kitchen walls.  I was going to say knocked hell out of my house actually and that is certainly how it felt.  In a four hundred year old  house you never know what you will find when you start to do any work at all.  We have decided to move our kitchen from the 1980s extension where it languishes now, all stained walls and peeling melamine cupboards, to the larger, older room at the front which used to be the dairy.  The room has been plastered with a mixture of lime plaster and new gypsum based plaster.  The new plaster has been gently falling off ever since we arrived and we have bitten the bullet and decided to have the whole room replastered. So here we are, bags and bags of rubbish later, with the plaster off and the old stone walls revealed. The floor is made of huge slabs of slate. The walls are hugely thick too but here and there taking off the plaster has brought pieces of stone gently ...

May is a time for wildflowers here. The primroses have gone, the wood anenomes are disappearing and the foxgloves have yet to come. But everywhere along verge sides and at the base of the hedgerows wildflowers are crowding out the grass. The wild cherry blossom and the blackthorn are fading but hawthorn, known also as may for the month of its flowering, is frothing along the hedges. Our hawthorn hedges here on the hill are still resolutely green, but for the sake of a couple of hundred feet (sorry, I know I should think of height in metric terms but it is a painful translation from feet to metres and doesn't mean anything in my head so I will old-fashionedly stick to feet today) the hawthorn trees at by the river in the bottom of the valley are just coming into bloom. Here is the first, the flowers flushed ever so faintly with pink. Walking today with a heavy pack (practice, practice for the Offa's Dyke, a little easier each time) I saw the impact of height on both plants and ...