welsh hills again

Still here, still doing the project!  Life has got a bit busy so that it has been a bit of a stretch both doing the project and recording it have  so here is a bit of a catch up. On Wednesday I went to Chelsea Flower Show which I decided to regard as part of the project, since thinking about the garden is a necessary part of gardening it.  Chelsea is an interesting conundrum.  The beauty and perfection of the show gardens is another world and the transient nature of what they produce is very different from what we try to do as gardeners with a garden which we live in and with the whole year round.  And yet it produces moments of delight and beauty as you clamber through the crowds. This is from one of artisan gardens which I like a lot for their small scale and accessibility.  I was struck this year by how often I was attracted by the hard landscaping as much as the planting.  Perhaps I am turning into Ian. I love this slate sphere and woul...

Does this count as nearly half way?  A couple of days so busy that there was not a space to get out into the garden.  I countered that by thinking about which plants I would have if I had a much smaller space.  I didn't get very far with that but in a couple of weeks I have been invited to go with a friend to Chelsea.  I am so looking forward to it. Today I more than made up for a couple of days off.  I planted all the plants I had bought earlier in the week.  The white foxgloves went into the side garden, currently being lit by the flame of this smyrnium perfoliatum.  I bought it years ago from Great Dixter.  It took a while to settle in but now it self seeds just enough to make it interesting. It is a triennial, the only one I have ever knowingly possessed.  This makes it even more important not to weed out the plants which have no flower spikes as they will sit quietly in year two before exploding into lime green gorgeousness in year ...

Well I did the time in the garden for day 29 but didn't manage to record it!  But here we are now on the last day of the month, day 30, and I can truly say that whenever we have been here, rain or shine, I have engaged with the garden.  There are three days when I didn't and those were when we were away in Devon looking after the delightful granddaughters.  Sometimes it has been a single dandelion, sometimes it has been an hour or two of weeding and working, but so far, so good.  It is too early to take stock I think but the garden does look better partly for my attention but mainly for spring. Here is one of two little crab apples in front of the holiday cottage just coming into blossom.  Yesterday I weeded the bed on the sunny bank here.  This is the driest, sunniest place in the garden and the soil is stony and drains like a sieve.  I planted three salvias that I had bought when I went plant shopping with my daughter in law on Saturday.  I...

Back to the project.  Five days entirely focussed on small girls and dogs took me away from my 100 days but here we are again, home, shattered but happy.  We have had fun.  While we have been away the garden has been burgeoning all over the place. The tubs full of tulips have burst into colour in front of the house and the holiday cottage but the beds are also bursting into weeds. I have come back from Devon with all the signs of another cold.  How can that be?  I decided to do an hour or so anyway and try to ignore it. First of all I planted out three white foxgloves which I brought home the other day.  They were very cheap and I'm pretty sure it is because they are not going to flower this year but never mind, they will be with me next year. Next I weeded a small herb bed which we planted up last year for the use of visitors to the holiday cottage.  I have loads of herbs in the kitchen garden but the only visitors we have ever had in twelv...

The mornings are misty just now.  Not a grey, damp mist but a pearly sheen of mist with the sun somewhere behind it, silvering the sky. It has been a perfect September day.  We have been working in the garden, Ian cutting some of the hedges and a lot of grass while I have cut back what feels like thirty wheelbarrows full of the self seeders which we like to have here but which take over the world if you let them seed: campanula, artemisia, alchemilla, feverfew.  I love them all but left to seed all over the place they squeeze out practically everything else. The whole garden is overflowing with harvest.  This summer has not been one for the garden as you can probably tell by the way it has not appeared in the blog.  But just now it doesn't seem to matter that we lost it under the demands of other things.  There has been a fantastic harvest of damsons. There are now twenty six jars of jam on the shelves, waiting for winter.  Damson jam is one of ...

Today I have had a quiet day, quiet and still and mostly outside in the vivid green of May sunshine.  It has been a frantic few weeks with change on the cards for both my father in law, who has moved to a residential home nearby, and for my father.  It has also been my father’s eightieth birthday, celebrated with an afternoon tea party in the village hall in Devon where my sister lives, crammed to the gunnels with family and friends.  There has been much visiting and much whizzing up and down the motorway.  It is too early to tell how these new arrangements will play out.  Time will tell. But today Ian went into Manchester to work on elder son’s new house and there was nobody here but me, a garden full of birds and the blowing sun.  I sat for a while in the side garden with a cup of tea and the unopened newspaper on my knee. In the trees behind the garden a heavy woodpigeon flapped to and fro, repeatedly crashing back into the top of ...

I love to go away and I love to come home.  A week in Devon, staying with my sister, helping to look after my brother and giving my parents a hand.  Being able to do this is one of the many reasons I gave up my big job.  When it works, and last week was a good week, it feels very right.  I know I am making a difference and to see the pleasure my brother takes in our company, to see my sister's children and stepchildren, to see my Dad smile with real happiness at a trip out he could not have taken by himself, to help my wonderful mum feel she is not alone, to chat with my sister and her partner when every one has gone to bed and to snatch an evening with my son and his wife, looking at the scan picture of their developing baby,  all of these things make me feel good, make me feel like myself.  But I missed Ian and I missed home and it was good to come down our drive, to see the view encircling me, to walk the garden and to sleep in my own bed with my own per...

Swallows: they are back.  I have been watching for weeks, looking out of the window, glancing up as I walk across the gravel, turning to look over my shoulder as I go for corn for the chickens.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Empty sky, despite the soaring buzzard, the flapping crow, the bouncing, skittering chaffinch.  And then one moment, looking out of the window for nothing, for something else, a swoop and a dive and a magic shape disappearing almost before you have seen it.  You stop.  You look.  You are waiting, too still.  And here it comes again: the perfect arc.  They are back. And today a shepherd's hut.  A place to sit and write and dream, up here in the far corner of the field.  We have already decided to have one, so today is for detail: colour, height, position of sockets, how big to make the hearth for the woodburner.  A place to be and not to do with a far, high view up across the valley and up towards the hills.

Yesterday I had one of those days when I suddenly felt overwhelmed.  Inside and out, there was so much to do that it seemed it could never be accomplished and we would always live in dust weeds and chaos.  I went looking for Ian to have a consoling hug and was surprised to find myself teary.  I am so not a teary person.  I am a cheerful, easy going, competent person with a tendency to look on the bright side in a possibly irritating, Polyannaish manner.  But not yesterday.  I fought back with a chicken tagine, some homegrown raspberries and cream and half a bottle of a good red wine, eaten properly at the specially cleared table instead of on trays on our knees. And this morning everything seemed manageable again.  I decided to have a day in the garden and started by taking my camera out to record the largest sunflower we have ever grown. I am five foot four, so the sunflower is probably about eight foot high and such a perfect flower, a flower to ...

A full few days and now everyone has gone.  I always like this.  I love it when the house if full and busy and everyone is round the table and I love it all over again when everyone goes and the house is quiet and we have the place back to ourselves. This weekend we had younger daughter and her friends with their three month old baby staying for a few days.  They are great visitors to have.  The girls muck in with cooking or take the making of a meal over entirely and Ady is happy (or at least appears happy!) to help Ian with whatever outdoor project is taking shape.  This weekend's project was making a concrete base to take two 1000 litre water tanks which are going to take the water from the workshop roof and serve the cutting garden and the new fruit and veg beds in the field. There was still time for much walking of the dog.  There is a great walk down to the river where she can jump and swim for sticks.  Wood anenomes have come into bloom over...