welsh hills again

This morning was just meant to be a quick whizz.  Karen and I had arranged to visit Lodge Lane Nursery run by Sue Beesley and just forty five minutes from here.  We had met Sue briefly at the Malvern Show and have communicated on Twitter and read each other's blogs.  I realised that I had visited the nursery under its previous ownership.   I liked Sue's blog.  We liked her plant list.  We thought we would just go and have a look.  This is easy for me from here but a bit more of a challenge for Karen who needs to travel for a couple of hours to get even to my house. But suddenly it all came together.  We could go, today, not for long.  Karen could stay overnight with her mother so we could get on the way early.  I could have a morning off from elder care.  Let's go. And it was just the best morning ever.  Sue was lovely.  The garden was amazing with that perfect combination of the beds that make you gasp with deligh...

This week we had our first night away since my father in law came to live with us, meticulously planned and much looked forward to.  We had our back up at home in place from a friend and were not going far, less than an hour's drive to Worthenbury Manor , just on the Welsh side of the Border with Cheshire but feeling far more like Cheshire than Wales to me!  Father in law had an early evening meal which suited him down to the ground.  I suspect he would eat at 5pm if it were left to him but we normally keep him hanging on (perfectly cheerfully it must be said) until 6 or even 7 when we have visitors. The drive was easy and we turned up just as the rain began to pour.  Ian, our host, was at the door with an umbrella and we raced through the downpour into a beautiful small manor house, all panelled walls and polished wood floors. We had a room with a four poster bed and the house to ourselves.  We had booked an evening meal with them too and the food was as go...

I have been a serious, obsessive gardener for years, but mainly between the months of March and July.  Any earlier and it is too cold and wet for much venturing out for softies like me.  Any later and I used to lose my head of steam and, after a glorious spring and early summer,  subside into drab August, better spent at the seaside.  By the time we all came home again and the kids went back to school there hardly seemed any point. But now I have got much more interested in late season gardening.  I think this is partly getting older and no longer feeling immortal.  If I only have another ten or twenty or thirty years, writing off half of them as gardening time seems a bit stupid.  And it is partly seeing the gardens of those, like Karen at Artist's Garden , who make their gardens sing at a time when mine used to be all dryness and flop. So on that front I have made real changes.  But seed sowing, the sign of a real gardener,  was always ...

I love keeping hens.  I love the eggs, brown and speckled with vivid orange yolks and a taste which beats even the best shop bought free range eggs.  I love the way they are a presence in the garden, rushing and clucking and shouting to each other and bustling about.  Watching them always makes me smile and the garden would feel empty and dead without them, although it might be quite a lot tidier. But it's time to lift the veil on the less pleasant side of chicken keeping.  Those of a squeamish disposition should look away now. One of our older hens is a Welsummer, a dark brown hen who lays dark brown eggs.  She was given to me by a friend because she was being mercilessly bullied in her flock and my friend wondered if a new flock would let her have a new start, a bit like sending a bullied child to a new primary school! It took her ages to settle in when she came.  She didn't seem to be bullied here, partly I think because she clearly knew her place...

Sometimes it is just one of those mornings.

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...

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...