welsh hills again

Ten days ago my son and his wife had their first baby, just a few days early.  It was a long labour.  C rang me on the evening of the day K went into hospital having had some bleeding.  I went to bed but all night long I kept finding myself awake, looking into the darkness, wondering what time it was.  Why had I woken?  Oh yes, the baby.  Was it born yet?  How were they? He rang again the following morning.  No, nothing, not yet, just tiredness and contractions.  They would induce her.  Again in the evening.  Things were happening but still painfully slowly.  Another night of drifting in and out of sleep.  It is not a rational thing.  You know perfectly well that it makes no difference whether you sleep or wake.  But still that primitive tie, that tug of blood, keeps pulling at you, tugging you out of sleep into dark wakefulness. On the following morning their daughter was born, our first granddaughter, as ou...

When I was eighteen I was desperate to leave home and to live in London.  A city, a great big city, buzzing and alight all night long, was clearly the only place to be.  Now I live in the country and in between times I have had all sorts of houses but until now they all shared one thing:  whether close to the centre or farther out into suburbia, they were somehow or other in cities.  I didn't really mean to live in cities after that first determined flight from the nest, it just happened.  Cities were where the work was so London, Birmingham and Manchester all became, at various times, home. Eight years ago we moved here.  That was a very determined move too, a deliberate choice to live in the country and to undertake a big move while we still had the energy both to make it happen and to live it when it had happened.  Is this my ideal house?  Well in some ways it is and in some ways it isn't but it is a very good house and I love lots of things ...

Yesterday autumn roared in on a thundering wind, blowing over the bay tree, sending the wheelie bin rolling down the grass, filling the air with flying flowerpots.  On the heels of the wind came a downpour which overflowed the gutters, set the land drains spouting, hammered on the slates and turned the paths to water. It was a day for staying in the warm kitchen. Our bedroom faces east.  When I woke up this morning the sun was pouring in and the sky was a vivid blue behind the ridge on the other side of the valley.  Today has been a gold and blue day, the sun warm, the air still. The crab apple is loaded down with fruit.  This is malus Red Sentinel, planted to replace a little quince tree which slowly but surely lost the will to live.  I kept trying to persuade myself that the quince would survive, even though it would shed a branch or two every time the wind blew strong.  Eventually it split in two, falling open at its heart.  The crab apple we...

I have been thinking a lot about what makes a good parent this last few weeks as I watch my own parents cope with the difficulties of my father's illness and struggle to work out for myself how best to show my own love and support for them. I think I am very lucky.  On the face of it the fact that my own father died when I was three and my brother one was clearly a tragedy, for my mother, for his own deeply loving family and for us.  Yet somehow out of that my mother, and my stepfather, conjured for us a very happy family and an easy, adventurous childhood. It is very many years since I thought of Dad as my stepfather.  He is just Dad. When you are a teenager you do not know that your own family is not normal.  I have read much about the child of an unhappy family slowly learning that theirs is not the only way to live and finding that there are families out there which are places of sustenance and love.  Many of them build their own lives very consciously t...

This year I absolutely promise that I am not going to turn my back on the garden and just sneak off inside.  I am going to clean the greenhouse and cut back and mulch and all those good things.  Honestly.  But there is nothing like a rainy day to set me thinking about winter projects.  I am not one of those people who carefully finishes one thing before starting another but even I was surprised at how many things I seem to have on the go or waiting.  Confession time. It is a bit of a giveaway that the basket which holds all the wool waiting to be worked is my  parents' old log basket, i.e quite a big one.  The bag on the top contains the project which at the moment is at the top of the queue.  Younger son and his wife are expecting their first baby in November and I am making a blanket. Not a delicate white blanket for a newborn but a cheery, cosy blanket for the car and the pushchair. The wool is a soft merino aran and the pattern is fr...

I have been reviewing plants from the online plant nursery Plant me now  right over this year and now is the time for winter bedding .  For me, winter bedding means plants that I use in pots, planted on top of layers of bulbs for spring.  I am very inclined to leave my garden be in the winter and come inside by the fire but I do plant up seven big pots before I give up and turn my back on it.  It is choosing the bulbs for the pots, especially tulips,  that really gets me going so I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed choosing other things for colour and form over the winter.  Last week the order arrived and I had a lot of fun unpacking it all and potting some of it on as I am not yet quite ready to do my tulip pots. As usual, the plants arrived well packaged and well grown, not huge but bigger than many plug plants which come from other nurseries.  I had ordered two different types of Viola Sorbet. This one is Viola Sorbet Lemon Blueberr...

For the last few years I have taken part in the End of Month view series of blogs, hosted by Helen at Patient gardener .  It has been an interesting exercise and, for someone who is trying to make a new garden where there was field before, a really useful way of looking back and seeing that there is progress. Even when I feel that everything is taking so very long and nothing is coming to fruition as I imagine, a look at the end of month photos since 2009 shows me that I am quite wrong.  Things are settling and maturing.  It is very cheering. This year the garden has very much taken second place to the rest of my life.  I had a big crisis of confidence with it last year and, although I recovered myself as spring returned and I fell back in love with my garden, I have had more time away from it than usual.  I have felt this year that I was running to catch up with myself, falling back through the door from a week in Devon with my parents, gathering myself, wand...