welsh hills again

For the last few years I have taken part in the End of Month view series of blogs, hosted by Helen at Patient gardener .  It has been an interesting exercise and, for someone who is trying to make a new garden where there was field before, a really useful way of looking back and seeing that there is progress. Even when I feel that everything is taking so very long and nothing is coming to fruition as I imagine, a look at the end of month photos since 2009 shows me that I am quite wrong.  Things are settling and maturing.  It is very cheering. This year the garden has very much taken second place to the rest of my life.  I had a big crisis of confidence with it last year and, although I recovered myself as spring returned and I fell back in love with my garden, I have had more time away from it than usual.  I have felt this year that I was running to catch up with myself, falling back through the door from a week in Devon with my parents, gathering myself, wand...

A busy time with my parents staying and work to do.  I look up and find I haven't blogged for nearly a fortnight and I have missed the September End of Month view which I have been trying to keep going, now in its second year and massively useful when it comes to winter thinking about the garden.  I have had a bit of a lull with the garden but find myself being gently tugged back again.  I have ordered bulbs and some bare rooted plants to define the corner where the shepherd's hut goes and I find myself mulling things over again.  It looks as if the spell is not broken. So here is a mix of musing and pictures for October. The sun comes up on a chill October morning.  I shall cut back the wild rose which is growing on top of the wall outside the kitchen door but not just yet, not while the rosehips are shining. The side garden has gone over now.  I know it is possible to have a garden which still sings in October (see Karen !) but although mine n...

I wish I wasn't so erratic about gardening.  I really thought I had cracked my tendency to lose interest in the garden in August.  Inspired by Karen  I have begun to engage with September and October in the garden and while my first love will always be spring, I have come to love the golden light of late summer and early autumn.  Maybe it is like a biological clock - you know, the stuff about whether you are a morning or a nighttime person. Perhaps you can have the same thing with times of year.   I have been keeping gardening diaries for ever. Year after year the detailed planning entries and commentaries on what is working and what's not from the early months tail off in mid July into disgruntled little notes "Looks tired", "No colour", "Everything's flopped" or even worse the pages of emptiness where I have clearly got fed up with the garden and gone walking. But the thing about Helen's end of month view posts is that the discipline m...

Is the year slipping away from me?  I took the photos for last month's end of month view post but somehow they never made it to the blog so here is a two for the price of one blog because the record is so interesting and useful.  It makes you stop and look and think. Here is the side garden at the end of June: The oriental poppies are still in flower and the blue hardy geraniums and simple orange day lillies. By the end of July the hardy geraniums and poppies have been cut back hard although the day lillies are still going strong.  The gazebo is up for a party with some friends who live in the US and are over here for the Olympics.  We had a great time with them and other friends who came up to spend time with them.  This makes the garden look quite formal which is misleading!  It is not. By the end of July the stars of the side garden are Crocosmia Lucifer and a persicaria given to me by a friend.  The fennel too is soaring and the rudbe...

Slightly belatedly, here is my end of month view for the coldest, wettest April I can remember! All the ground in the side garden has filled up with foliage, day lillies, peonies, hardy geraniums, jostling with euphorbia and hellebores, these last still flowering away although the flowers are slowly turning to a pale, creamy green.  The colour here is mainly from tulips.  These are Hermitage, a new favourite. Out in the field the little orchard is beginning to come into blossom and tiny tulipa linifolia is showing through the lengthening grass. The apple blossom is in flower. The peas are out in the vegetable beds. The new native hedges are thickening up and beginning to deter dogs and small boys from crashing through. The annual meadow is sown, fenced off from said dogs and small boys, but seems to be growing mainly scruffy bits of grass.  Sigh. There are bluebells in the hedge bottoms, as always lovelier than anything I can create. ...