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...

I have been better at doing the gardening part of the project than I have at recording it on the blog!  This weekend has been full of family as younger son and his family came up from Devon and two of the others came across to say hello.The sun shone and the children got on amazingly well especially when you consider that they don't see each other that often!  And the value of the garden as a place to be was clear: to sit and chat and play and kick a football or throw a rugby ball or be endlessly pushed on a swing, to feed hens and make dens, to be taken for a walk by granddaughter number one, aged four and a half.  "I'm going to show you that there is even more garden down here, Grandma.  Follow me.  It goes on for ever."  (It really doesn't unless you are four.) So I am feeling more in love with the garden than I have for a long time.  Here is the side garden bubbling over with blue geranium. And the kitchen garden beautifully disguising it...

Today is a classic example of a British April day.  This morning started sunny.  Ian was going to Manchester to prepare elder son's garden for turfing.  We had been intending to go and work together but the forecast was for rain and showers and I was pretty sure that my improving cold did not need a morning digging in the rain.  So I stayed home and, contrary as an April day, the sun kept shining.  I decided to walk down to the river as part of trying to reclaim my pre-winter fitness.  It is easy to go down but a long old slog up and if I want to continue to climb hills I have to continue to climb hills. Over the garden gate the wind is blowing the sun and clouds about and the birds are singing. I walk down quickly, listening to birdsong, noticing the wood anenomes starring the sides of the path.  At the bottom of the hill the highland cattle are out, drowsing in the sun. By the side of the river, still fast and full, the kingcups are sh...

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...

I wake up.  The light is streaming in because we never shut our curtains up here.  It is half past six and I turn over and drift back to sleep.  After years and years of dawn starts with small children and work and commuting, is there a greater luxury? As usual Ian must have got up without waking me because when I wake again it is a quarter to eight and he is not in the bed.  From downstairs I hear the sound of him in the kitchen.  He will have already made tea and porridge for his father and now the kettle is boiling again and he is making a cup of tea for me.  Double luxury! It is quiet here.  On a school morning faintly from the farm next door will come the sound of mothers calling and car doors slamming.  The cockerel might be heard crowing from the kitchen garden.  But there is no traffic, there are no trains or planes, just birds squabbling on the feeders and the cat calling meekly yet insistently for more food (not birds!). Break...

This week I went to see Karen at Artists Garden and drove the high and lovely road West across Wales to the sea.  I love this road.  I have driven it in sun and in rain and in winter , summer and autumn and whenever I drive it the high emptiness of the Denbigh moors followed by the slow and beautiful descent to the sea makes my heart sing. Karen had also arranged for me to meet Kate at Beangenie guessing rightly that we would have a lot in common so it was day for wandering around their gardens, sitting outside a lot, drinking lots of tea and relishing good company. Karen's garden is very different from  my own both in size and in the style of planting.  Her garden is a late summer and autumn garden and sure enough there was still colour from a whole bed of salvias shimmering in the still sunlight.  And there was movement too, even on a windless day, from the grasses firing upwards like fireworks or fountaining gently in flowing curves down by the studio....

OK, rant over.  Normal service is resumed.  It was great though to find how many of you share my wish that we could all relax, accept that we grow older,  and be comfortable in our own skin. Saturday here was a beautiful golden day, autumn at its absolute best.  Younger son and daughter in law were staying for the weekend and we all went walking.  I love the way here that you can walk, really walk with grass and heather, hills and views to the horizon, right from the door. The dog loved it too.  You can just see her at the top of the path, whizzing back to check where we were, before heading off again at a joyous lope. As we walked up to the end of the road we met a local farmer.  "Better just hop over the stile there" he said.  "I'm bringing the cattle down."  Safely  on the far side of the gate, we watched as the herd came down from the hill, driven from behind by two guys on one very small moped. I don't know how many th...

Life is full up on the hill at the moment. The kitchen is still in progress. Here is Ian taking out the sink and then the new ceiling in all its newly plastered glory. Still to be done? Don't ask. It will happen, eventually. The garden is throwing stuff at us faster than we can eat it: cavolo nero, onions, chard, beetroot, potatoes, raspberries, blueberries, beans, salad stuff. And the cutting garden too is full: full of dark purple sweet peas, orange marigolds, orange and gold cosmos, black cornflowers and White nicotiana. There are jugs all over the house but I still can't keep up. And of course there are the projects which have totally stalled. The quilt which hasn't moved on since last November is lying in a box upstairs. At some point it will start whimpering reproachfully when I go by but just now it is dozing quietly. The socks which I dropped a stitch on in January have already got to that reproachful stage. Every time I go past my knitting bag they sigh heavily....

I have just had a week out of time, a week to wander gardens in great company, a week of sunshine and flowers by the ton.  My head is still spinning with colour and light and fizzing ideas. Way back in February when I planned a visit to some gardens in Devon the idea seemed like a lifeline.  Life was hard, my brother was in hospital, we were all adjusting to having my father in law to live with us and I was buffetted by how much I wanted to be able to put things right and how little I could do.  As I sat at Karen 's table on a wet and blustery winter day I felt stretched out thin like an old handkerchief, pale and see through and just as likely to tear.  On a July morning as I left home in the sunshine life had moved on.  We adjust, we human beings, we get used to things, even difficult things.  Now it felt not like a necessity but like an indulgence to drive away and leave Ian looking after domestic life and his father. I was travelling with Karen and ...

Here is the side garden.  The hardy geraniums are blasting away, the peonies are just finishing and the poppies are about to come into flower.  Come closer and you can see it all surging upward. And closer still Out in the field the daffodils are long since over, the apple blossom is gone but the wild flowers in the orchard are coming into flower. You need to take the path to get in amongst them to see them properly. This is fox and cubs which I mentioned in an earlier post. Around them the ox eye daisies are just about to open, late I know to those who live lower down and further south. A spire of self sown white foxglove pushes up through grasses and plantain. The cutting garden is still more promise than plenty.  It will be good this year I hope.  Everything in it is timed to be in flower for Ian's birthday on 1st July.  I realise this makes me sound like a Chelsea wannabee and really it will flower whenever it wants to and the weathe...