welsh hills again

It is Easter.  Instagram is full of beautifully styled Easter trees and chocolate eggs.  But in amongst all that loveliness I came across a post on the #100dayproject which stood out somehow.  The idea is that for one hundred days you should do something in the garden every day and that, however small it was, it would make you connect with your garden and make the garden feel loved and lived in.  I wondered if I could combine something like that with my blog which also needs attention from me to feel loved and lived in so I thought I would give it a go.  I am not promising myself to post every single day because I know that we will have time away when both the garden and the blog will be out of reach but I will see how I go with a little bit of garden and a little bit of blog. I really wanted to start today because it is the 1st April and that seems like a suitably new day/new month/spring sort of fresh start.  That was the first problem because I have sp...

  The blossom on the wild cherry is perfection in its white delicacy.     In the garden the intense yellow green sings of May,  here smyrnium perfolitatum, a triennial. And here euphorbia characias.  If I were an insect I would live in it.   Or maybe in these magnolias.  Look at the thick creamy sculpted flowers.  What a home they would make.   Out in the orchard the apple trees are coming into flower.     And in the pots in front of the house an explosion of orange tulips: Ballerina, Hermitage and Couleur Cardinal.  Can we just hold the moment for a little longer?

So how was Leiden?  Beautiful, a mini Amsterdam with canals and bridges and bikes. It is a university town with something of the same feel as Cambridge, but with canals! The place we stayed in was a real find, an apartment on the Nieuwe Rijn.  Ours was not the one pictured on this website but had two bedrooms, a fabulous bathroom and a small sitting area within the larger bedroom overlooking the canal.  Everything was spotless and comfortable, the bathroom was to die for and our host, Leon, made us wonderful breakfasts in the spacious kitchen overlooking a terrace.  Brilliantly situated, beautifully furnished and cared for and really nice people.  If you can get to Leiden I would really recommend it. We rented bikes from our hosts and, having not ridden a bike for about twenty five years, I tested the cliche that you never forget and found it to be true. The Keukenhof gardens were amazing,  not a garden in the ordinary sense o...

I am feeling excited, very excited.  I love tulips and have grown them in pots and in the ground here every year since we came over nine years ago.  On a cold grey February morning I was having a cup of tea with a friend and we got to talking about the bulb fields in the Netherlands and the gardens at Keukenhof .  My friend used to live in Leiden, right on the doorstep of all of this.  I confessed I had always wanted to go.  "Well we should, of course we should.  We should go this spring.  Let's look at flights.." and in half an hour we were booked with flights and accommodation.  Ian was happy to hold the fort here and with my dad.  For weeks it felt a bit pretend.  But it is here, now, today.  This afternoon we fly to Amsterdam. Will it really look like this? Or this? Or this? These images are all from holland.com  but I will come back with some of my own. This is exactly the sort of visiting I love.  ...

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...

I love tulips.  For a while in my gardening life I struggled to create the effects that I wanted until I had the blinding realisation that the problem was that I was not using enough of them.  Isn't it wonderful when the right answer is the exciting answer?  Now I buy in bulk.  I plant new ones in pots, some new ones in the ground and, when I can get my act together, some of the ones which were in last year's pots into the ground too.  This is the  counsel of perfection as usual and doesn't always happen.  In the autumn of 2010 I remembered in time to get quite a lot into the cutting garden.  Last year I lifted all my bulbs, failed to label them, left them to die down and failed to remember that they were hiding in a big pot in the kitchen garden. When I came across them in November when I was planting out my new ones I found that most of them had rotted or been eaten.  Some did go into the cutting garden and into beds in the kitchen gar...

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....