welsh hills again

One of the things I love about having blogged for so many years is that I can look back on how things were and how things are now.  I know in my head that our garden was a field when we came fourteen years ago.  But it is hard to remember how it was.  What I see when I wander around has come about so slowly that I have lost the sense of how it was.  This picture shows the native tree bed at the bottom of our field.  It was planted first with trees and dogwoods about ten years ago.  In the picture above the bed is about three years old, with snowdrops beginning to spread and the dogwoods starting to grow. This is how it looks now, ten years on,  the trees large and shady, the dogwoods growing and the hellebores in full flower.   The trees tower above your head.  It is hard to think that they have not always been there. It is so easy to forget how things change.  This picture shows the newly planted orchard in spring...

A mixed up sort of week!  On Saturday last we went to Florence for a few days.  My niece has been studying there this year and we went to catch up with her, to revisit Florence and to have a few days away. It was cold at home in Wales once you left the warmth of the woodburner.  Italy was cloudy but milder and as we travelled by bus from Pisa airport to Florence there was blossom piled on the bare branches of trees.  I don't think I have been to Italy this early in the year before.  The grass was still green.  Even without the sun there was a faint sense of spring around the corner.  We had booked a place to stay through Airbnb, which we use a lot when we travel.  It was about forty minutes walk from the station or a taxi ride.  We walk a lot when we are in foreign cities so we walked there, in default mode, although by the time we arrived I was tired and hungry.  It seemed a long time since we had left home that morning when we fina...

Rain, grey, thin, drizzling rain.  I have been out all morning at my Welsh class and in half an hour I am out again.  I really do not want to get wet before I go.  I really do not want to break my run of time in the garden. I rush out.  I deadhead a dozen or so daffodils by the crab apple tree and rush back in again, hair already frizzing, shoulders damp, hands dirty despite the gloves. Does that count?

Day 23 did not go as I had planned.  The cold which was thinking about returning yesterday (and let's face it, it is only about a week since its predecessor went) decided that it would come marching back.  I had a go this morning at making soup and shaving my legs and behaving like someone who felt all right, only to have to admit by lunchtime that I didn't feel good at all.  So this afternoon was a write off but this morning, before it was a write off, I did one small gardening thing for the 100 day project. We grow hundreds of daffodils up here.  Wales is a good place for daffodils.  There might even be thousands or a thousand or so, I am not sure.  There seems to be conflicting advice about whether or not to deadhead daffodils.  Some experts suggest that you increase the proliferation of daffodils if you do, some suggest that it makes little difference.  I tend to deadhead where it makes a big difference to the look of the part of the garden....

Day 12 is looking like a challenge.  It is misty.  It is cold.  It is dank.  Do I want go outside?  No I do not.  What on earth can I think of that I would like to do and that I have the energy to do? I think today I might make something different count as part of the project and pick daffodils for the house.  After all a garden is for pleasure and part of the pleasure of a cold dank day is to bring armfuls of daffodils into the kitchen. There, and today that is the 100 day project: daffodils and primroses and pulmonaria.

We were away overnight staying with some friends and got back home about five o' clock.  Normally I would make a cup of tea, have half an hour with the newspaper and then get on with making a meal.  Today as we were driving home from Derbyshire I was thinking about what I might do that would count for day 8 of the 100 day project.  I decided on a little bit more cutting back.  I am still coughing although I am sure I am getting better, slowly.  Cutting back is quick and easy and the garden is full of tatty growth which has been blasted by the cold weather or is the dead growth from last year. It is a quarter to six.  The low evening sun is shining through the dead stems of last year's phlox.  I cut that back and the euphorbia next to it.  Small job and it does reveal the weed and the grot grown through the bed but that is fine.  Today I am not weeding and today I am not despairing!  Today I am cutting back the phlox.  Tick. ...

It has been an extraordinary autumn.  Morning after morning up here on our hillside we have woken to golden light and heavily dewed grass.  We face South East and the morning sunlight pours in through our bedroom window, pooling gold on the carpet.  Outside everything is still flowering and glowing.  By lunchtime it is warm enough to eat outside. On many mornings the sky has been full of sun while the valley below us is brimming with mist. But by lunchtime the world emerges bright and clear and warm. Sedum throbs with bees and butterflies. Everywhere berries are ripe.  Cotoneaster herringbones its way up the stone wall by the drive. Rosehips swell. The walnut tree is laden with nuts in their glossy green cases which stain your hands a vicious black. In the edge of the hen enclosure I find this huge fungus, the size of a small plate, ignored so far by the chickens.  They are moulting and looking a bit scraggy, their feath...

The wind blew back in early this week and after a sunny, warm weekend I turned back inside.  There was a huge floor cushion to be made for five year old grandson to accompany his curtains. There was more to be done on the project of knitting a cushion to reflect our hillside. The colours reflect the different greens of the fields and the open hills.  The darker brown rows are the lines of hedges and bare trees and the gold is the bracken.  I have spent an hour or two weaving in the ends, an oddly meditative kind of thing to do, before casting on the other side and seeing what comes. Then there was bread to be made before turning from the practical to the numinous. There was Alan Garner's last public lecture to go to.  Alan Garner is a great writer and counts amongst his admirers the author Philip Pullman and Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury.  The picture shows Alan's house where he has lived and written all his adult life....

The end of March.  The clocks have gone forward  Surely, surely it must be spring. "March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb."  I have always loved that saying but this year and last it has not proved true.  Last year here in North Wales March went out with the cold savagery of a snow tiger.  We had ten foot high snow drifts and many farmers lost sheep and lambs in staggering numbers to the devastating spring snowstorms which come only once in a generation.  This year the lamblike part of March was in the first part of the month with sunshine, warm temperatures and gentle breezes which made the daffodils open in a great yellow rush down the hill under the fruit trees. I love these little Tenby daffodils, narcissus obvallaris,  and they are naturalising busily now.  They are small in scale with a jaunty, upright stance, perhaps less graceful than the pseudonarcissus which were Wordworth's daffodils but gloriously happy somehow. ...

There was an awful lot of snow.  When the great fall came we spent two and a half hours digging ourselves out.  And now, nearly two weeks on, there is still quite a bit lying. The wind piled great drifts, as high as the stone pigsties.  The kitchen garden was one great surging sea of snow.  Usually it looks like this, in fact this picture was taken a couple of days before the snow hit. Today it still looks like this. Ian spent hours and hours digging and shovelling and hiking in and out of here over and through the snow to the hens.  They spent the worst of the days confined to their house and then nearly a week with access only to the enclosed run.  On Tuesday Ian and a friend's son dug out the deep drifts which had buried the fencing for the larger run and reinstated it. It's a good job that only the large house at the end is in use at the moment as the two smaller houses which we use for younger birds had filled right up with snow. ...

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 catalo...