welsh hills again

What skills have you got?  And are there any you wish you had?  Skills are an odd thing.  They accumulate gently through life.  One moment you are a child wrestling with wool and knitting needles and dripping tears on the ladder of another dropped stitch in the scarf which is too loose and too narrow and curls up at the edges.  Next you are a young working mother with time so squeezed that the idea of knitting anything at all is simply ludicrous.  How can you possibly have time to knit when you don't even have time to cut your own toenails? And yet somehow you must have done enough knitting often enough because you find yourself years later able to knit and with time for knitting and finding it satisfying and pleasurable.  How did that happen?  Did I learn the skill when my back was turned? What else can I do that I must have learned?  Cooking, but that is an easier one to understand.  I learned cooking with my mother.  My mother ...

As long time readers will know, last year was a disaster in the garden.  The sudden death of my mother, my father's deterioration with Motor Neurone Disease and the decline and subsequent death of my father in law all conspired to produce a year which was entirely overtaken by family and family responsibilities.  The garden disappeared under a tide of weeds and unchecked growth and the state of it depressed me so much that I could only manage by not looking at it, not spending time in it, not thinking about it.  Wandering around left me desperately aware of everything that needed attention and attention was the one thing it could not have.  I shut myself off from the garden as much as I could and when I did think about it I was assailed by a sense of failure.  Even what I had done in creating some parts of the garden from a field felt hopelessly inadequate.  My vision of what I was trying to do slid away like water down a drain.  I hardly felt like mys...

Life is full of surprises.  On Wednesday I had a visit from Anne Wareham and her husband Charles Hawes.  I have known Anne virtually for a while.  I follow her on Twitter, read her website thinkingardens , and she reads my blog from time to time and occasionally comments.  I met her and Charles briefly at the Malvern show last year and I keep an eye out for her journalism.  We had a couple of email exchanges after I blogged about a recent visit to Beth Chatto's garden and she suggested that she would like to come up and see the garden.  So that was the first surprise. My immediate reaction was to wonder if she was serious - Veddw is a great garden, my garden is hardly yet even a work in progress.  I am not a trained gardener.  I am not an artist.  I used to be an adviser on international tax and now I am a garden obsessive, partly I think to use up the energy which used to go into my work.  My second reaction was to be intrigued. ...

Last night younger daughter arrived with her best friends and their fourteen  month old little girl.  Today Karen from An Artist's Garden was coming for lunch so this morning I set to work in the kitchen. Yesterday I had produced two lemon drizzle cakes, one perfect, the other with a surprising hole in the middle.  However we agreed that this was fine as you could persuade yourself you were not eating yet another slice of cake but a bit more hole, with cake surround. Today has been a day for making Somerset Apple Cake, carrot and coriander soup and now a beef casserole with a cheesy scone topping. There was a small break there for going away and eating. I love being able to produce good food from the contents of my fridge and store cupboard.   I love the fact that there is always enough in stock to know that I can turn out something good.  I would hate not to be able to cook.  Of all the skills I have acquired as an adult I think cooking and dr...

Last week, a trip to Derbyshire to help younger son and his wife with installing their new kitchen. This week a trip to Oxford to do some jobs for older daughter and her family and some for younger daughter in her new flat.  I think Ian should buy a nice white van and have it fitted out with his tools.  This would stop us going through the process of packing the car, unpacking it and packing it up again only to unpack it when we get home.  Beats the gym I guess. It is very good to be able to help adult children like this, although it is Ian who does all the work if I am honest.  I hang around making tea, carrying the baby or walking the dog, gardening if there is a garden. Now weeks stretch in front of us with no long distance DIY.  There is work to be done of the paying variety and lots of work in the house and garden too. The garden is at that stage in the year when everything looks tired and needs revitalising.  Veg needs to be sown into the beds ...

I once got talking to a friend about houseworky things.  We were both speakers at a conference in San Diego before you get too stereotypical an idea.  She was saying how much she hated emptying the dishwasher and doing the ironing and I was quite surprised because, while I am not a great housewife, those are two of the jobs that I don't much mind.  Then I read in a blog the other day about the writer's dislike of potting on and pricking out and thought "Oh, I quite like that" so it got me musing about what I do and don't like doing in the garden. Things I like: I love sowing seeds, preferably in the greenhouse in spring when it is cold outside but warm enough to take my jacket off inside out of the wind .  My resolution this year is to label everything, not just the first few trays I sow, but everything, all the time.  Chances of success? Low. I like cutting things back, not the large scale pruning which needs pruning saws and loppers, but the tidying up sor...

I sometimes come across something which hangs around with me and won't quite leave me alone until I give it some time and really think about it.  I have been wondering over the winter about why I garden with the passion and devotion I do.  Anne Wareham who has produced the most stunning garden at Veddw  and who edits a fascinating website at thinkingardens  argues most persuasively for gardening as a form of art, as in her hands it surely is.  But that is not how it is for me.  So what is happening for me that makes it take up so much of my time and energy and thought? We have two acres of land which surround our sixteenth century farmhouse on the Clwydian hills in North Wales. The land is all sloping and the soil is stony and fastdraining, although fertile enough if you help it along a bit with compost and manure. We have been here for four years and I am very slowly planting and cultivating. What I am doing is not in any way gardening as a form of art. ...