welsh hills again

Yesterday Frances left a comment which really struck me, you know the way things do which sound obvious but which you had somehow managed not to understand.  Gardens are good for self care she said. We were talking about looking after yourself which is something I have been thinking about a lot as the fourth cold of the winter struck.  And I thought, well yes, gardens must be good for self care.  There is all sorts of research demonstrating that being outside, looking at green, has a beneficial impact on both mental health and physical recovery from illness.  So gardens must be good for self care. But not if you do them the way I have been doing for the last few years.  Gardens as an endless to do list do not soothe the soul.  They just make you feel beaten up about all the things you have not done.  And yet gardens overgrown and uncared for don't soothe the soul either.  They are a reproach as the garden ceases to be a garden and becomes a fore...

Today I thought I would tell you a bit more about why I have embarked on the 100 day project.  Gardening and blogging have been long standing passions for me and over the last three or four years I have in some ways lost touch with them both.  Gardening was the first to go.  We have nearly two acres here.  When we first came there was an intensively gardened kitchen garden and one or two small areas which were planted up but most of the land was a large field with two apple trees, one walnut tree and a lot of rough grass.  For the first six or seven years we were here making a garden out of a field became an obsession.  I read about plantsand gardens night and day.  I tested the soil.  I sketched and researched and made plant lists and planted and planted.  Some of that was successful: the fruit trees grew in the little orchard, the mixed native hedging grew and so did the native trees.  Daffodils grew although there were never enough....

One of my longrunning favourite blogs is Croftgarden , the story of a garden sometimes battered by winds and storms and sometimes bathed in sunshine on the coast of South Uist in the Hebrides.  I was lucky enough to go a couple of years ago.  It's an amazing place and a testament to the extraordinary energy and commitment of Christine and her husband that there is a garden where the land meets the sea. Christine has just blogged her answers to eleven questions on her garden and has nominated another five blogs to respond to her own questions as part of the Liebster awards.  I am honoured to be asked.  Here are her questions and my answers: 1. How would you describe your gardening style? Naturalistic would be kind.  Unkempt would be another way of putting it.  I am trying to garden in a high site surrounded by farmland and open moorland and to produce something which fits the place. 2. Who or what has influenced the design of your garden? I hope t...

Months ago Ian came in from his office, as we grandly call the overcrowded and chilly porch where the desktop computer lives, and said "Listen to this.  You would like this."  It was an email invitation to Perch Hill, home of Sarah Raven and Adam Nicolson , to a summer event, a feast, with names from the world of food such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall .  Visitors were to stay in tents.  It was to be a weekend for wandering around the garden and eating glorious food. I would like it.  I would like it a lot.  Within an hour I had established that Ian was not bothered about going himself but happy for me to go, approached a friend who is always up for doing something new and interesting, even though she is not a gardener and much more interested in eating food than cooking it, and by ten past nine the next morning we were booked in.  The speed and decisiveness aren't too uncharacteristic but they don't usually get used on somethi...

A day off booked and in the diary and a weather forecast full of wind and rain.  I am going to visit Karen at Artist's Garden to see her and to look at her garden, last seen in cold and empty February .  The weather map on the BBC site shows a violent pulse of blue and green storm sweeping the North West corner of Wales in the morning.   After breakfast here in the North East corner it is windy, the air cool and brisk with the promise of rain, as I let the hens out, open up the greenhouse and decide that I will go, rain or no rain. Westward, rising high on the Denbigh moors and the wind is snatching at the car.  It is too high and bleak here for trees.  Buffetted sheep huddle by piles of stones, pummelled by the wind.  I head down to the A5 and find the short cut through Ysbyty Ifan is closed to traffic.  The sainted sat nav sends me down towards Dolgellau.  As the car descends below the treeline there are branches on the road and new leav...

I have been reading a wonderful post at Esther's Boring Garden blogspot (and don't be fooled.  She was just too modest to call it Esther's fascinating garden blog which is what it is.)  In it she talks about her dream garden, not a fantasy garden but the way parts of her real garden represent bits of a dream: a single primrose by the path is a bank of primroses.  It resonated  strongly with me.  I suspect most gardeners have a dream version of their own garden.  It's that dream that keeps us plotting and planting and musing about our gardens. That sensation is very strong when you are slowly making a garden.  So much of my garden as yet in is my head and what is happening on the ground is sometimes something of a surprise, so vivid are things in my mind's eye.  So here are some of my dream spots. Under the viburnum by the gate to the field the soil is shaded and dry.  In my head it is marbled with cyclamen and dancing with epimedium....

This week a book arrived in the post.  Always a good thing.  I didn't pay for the book as it is a review copy which has also to be a good thing, although to be honest I would have happily paid and if you read my earlier review of Toby Buckland's book you will see that getting a review copy does not equate to unqualified adulation in the review.  I did  like Toby's book, mind, just not enough to buy it. This book is Mark Diacono 's Taste of the Unexpected.  Mark is the head gardener at River Cottage and in his own garden at Otter Farm he grows unexpected and delightful things to eat.  This book is an encouragement to us all to break out of the ruts full of potatoes and carrots in which we all plod and have a go at new and unusual fruit and vegetables. I can't review it yet because I am still reading it and probably will be for a bit because it bears close attention and I am still thinking about it.  This is unusual for me.  Normally I'm a bit...

Yes, I know it not the 1st of January.  I'm just a bit late.  One of the good things about blogging is that it is so easy to check what I have been doing in January for the last couple of years.  I see that last year I didn't make any resolutions at all and the year before I tried to make postive resolutions rather than the usual "lose weight, drink less, exercise more" litany that has been following me around for years. Reading them now from 2008 I see   I didn't too terribly well with the ones I did make.  The resolution to cook more interestingly, using my huge range of cookery books, was the one which was most successful.  I can't say I achieved the one about being glamourous on Thursdays.  I do from time to pull out something which is not the ubiquitous jeans and fleece and dress up a bit, but it is more like once every couple of months than once a week - less in winter because the urge to keep my clothes on when I have got dressed is very powe...

I have always loved September. It might help that it is my birthday month. It might also be because I was a child who liked school and, even though I had loved the summer holiday, I also loved the buying of the new pencil case, the new pencils and rubbers, the folding back of the stiff cover of an exercise book to reveal a pristine sheet of clean paper, smelling of promise. October is OK. There is still a chance of a day filled with the golden light and long shadows of an Indian summer. The only problem with October is that it is followed by November when the clocks have gone back and the days are grey with wind and rain and the light has all gone by mid afternoon and I have to work hard at shedding the sense of gloom and focussing on the light and warmth of Christmas to distract me from the grievous loss of my outside life. So I have mixed feeling about autumn. Is it beautiful, with flowers still glowing and crops thronging the kitchen? Or is it full of sadness, full of the loss of su...

Tomorrow I am to be visited by Zoe from Garden Hopping which is both a great pleasure and a cause of mild anxiety. Zoe is a serious gardener, someone who knows a lot about plants and gardens. I am a passionate gardener but so haphazard and self taught. My bookshelves groan with books about plants. I think about my garden, muse, sow, propagate but I am a rank amateur. I garden on a high bare hill, with a northwest wind and a stony soil. Much of what I tried to grow in my first year here failed. Now I propagate madly from what is here and what will thrive. There is no point in planning a thrillingly designed sort of space with rooms and great herbaceous borders and topiary, all of which I love. We are an ancient farmhouse on the side of a steep valley. The garden is a mixture of the veg patch, which has been gardened productively for generations, and a field. I plant trees for an orchard and daffodils round their feet. The trees are not twigs now, although they were a couple ...

My lovely daughter is about to acquire her first house and her first garden. After years of wandering around gardens with her and having her say "But how do you know all this stuff?" she is about to start getting to know it herself. Well here to start her off are a few things I wish I had known about gardening when I started. 1. Things die. You will waste a lot of money on plants which turn up their toes. It is best to be philosophical about this and regard it as the opportunity to buy another plant. I used to beat myself up about all the things I put into my garden which simply disappeared. Now I realise that you can do things to minimise plant loss but sometimes it is just a mystery: you thought something would be happy in your garden and it isn't. Never mind. Move on. There are so many plants out there. Have a go with something else. But the business about things being happy in your garden is important and it took me years to garden to my soil and not to be led by glor...