welsh hills again

Simplify. What a lovely word. I am not sure I will ever achieve the simpler life I longed for when we moved here.  Life is too complicated and most of those complications come from the relationships with friends and family which create the web of love and responsibility without which I wouldn't be me.  But things, what about things? I have been amusing myself with a game of what I would keep if I could have only ten things to take with me from my house.  The ten things don't have to be practical so you don't need to choose a washing machine or a table or a bed, although I suppose you could if any of these is a special version which gives you real pleasure.  They are ten things that are personal to you, that mean something to you, that represent home.  Imagine if you like that they are ten things which you would take with you as a 21st century pioneer, the things that would go into your trunk as you set off for a new life in Australia or the far West of Ame...

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 ...

Some plants take a long time to actually arrive in your garden.  Maybe you read about them, see a picture or admire one in a garden you are visiting.  You put it on your mental or not so mental list and then somehow you fail to find it and it hangs around as a vague aspiration, something you like the sound of but are not so driven to have that you track it down like a rare animal.   It must be years since I first read about smyrnium perfoliatum.   I liked the idea of something other than euphorbia doing that vivid limey, yellowy green which seems so much the colour of spring, but spring intensified, spring squared.  I liked the name too and the way it rolled around your tongue.  But I never saw it anywhere as a plant or as seeds and was a bit put off by the sense that it was slow and tricky.  Still I kept an eye out for it, just in case. I bought one tiny plant at a visit to Great Dixter, my first and only visit so far, which my blogging ...

Suddenly the garden is full of spring.  Life has been so full of driving and journeying and worrying about both my father and my father in law, both failing in different ways at different ends of the country, that I don't seem to have looked at the garden for a few weeks.  Last time I looked the beds were empty and covered with sticks and old leaves, a mute reproach, not mulched or weeded or showing signs of having had any loving attention.  Wandering around in the sunshine a couple of days ago I found that all sorts of things had emerged and filled out and burst into flower, quite without assistance from me or anyone else. Erythronium Pagoda is flowering with a graceful beauty that makes me feel I need to wash the whole side garden with it.  It took a long time to decide that it was happy here and for two or three years my three plants sat quietly, throwing out the odd flower spike but certainly not colonising or establishing in a way that looked permanent. ...

Well I am beginning to wonder whether I chose the right tree.  I can't say my rowan is doing very much.  All the other trees on Lucy's tree following blog seem to be making a bit more of a stir. There is the very slightest swelling of the buds but this particular tree remains very determinedly bare. At its feet the celandines are shining and the grass is growing. The badger path which runs beside the tree and under the fence into the next field is becoming well worn.  I wonder how many badgers are using it?  I must ask Ian to set up the wildlife camera over night up here so we can see. I am blaming the badgers for the fact that these daffodils have had their tops and flowers nibbled off.  I am not sure if badgers do have a weakness for daffodils and certainly most of ours seem to have survived unscathed but these are right next to the path - perhaps just too much temptation, like a piece of chocolate left on the worktop. There is much new ...

If you have been reading this blog for a while you may remember that last year I reviewed a variety of plants from Plant me Now , an online plant nursery.  The plants were always well grown and everything I had from them last year  has survived really well so I was very pleased to be asked to review some  perennials  for them this spring. I am on a bit of a mission to increase the number of perennials in my cutting garden.  I have so far relied heavily on annuals and grown most of them from seed.  This is fine when you have the time and attention to devote to seed raising but this year is not the year for that.  I can pretty much guarantee that if I disappear down to Devon  every couple of weeks for a few days things will die and I can do without that.  The garden has to sustain me this year and not be too hard work.  It has to be somewhere that restores and recharges my batteries (is that possible?  not looking to...

The end of March.  The clocks have gone forward  Surely, surely it must be spring. "March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb."  I have always loved that saying but this year and last it has not proved true.  Last year here in North Wales March went out with the cold savagery of a snow tiger.  We had ten foot high snow drifts and many farmers lost sheep and lambs in staggering numbers to the devastating spring snowstorms which come only once in a generation.  This year the lamblike part of March was in the first part of the month with sunshine, warm temperatures and gentle breezes which made the daffodils open in a great yellow rush down the hill under the fruit trees. I love these little Tenby daffodils, narcissus obvallaris,  and they are naturalising busily now.  They are small in scale with a jaunty, upright stance, perhaps less graceful than the pseudonarcissus which were Wordworth's daffodils but gloriously happy somehow. ...