welsh hills again

June 21st, midsummer's evening.  We decide to sleep in the shepherd's hut,  a night away for the sake of walking across the field.  Inevitably there is some football on the television so for much of the evening we are in the house as Ian watches while I potter about the internet.  Then at around ten o' clock I gather up my reading glasses and my book.  I am rereading, for perhaps the fourth or fifth time, "Notes from Walnut Tree Farm" by Roger Deakin.  It is a book full of snippets of Deakin's writing, notes and diary entries, some several pages, some only a couple of sentences long.  Some are musings about writing or nature. He walks, he works on the land, he writes about what he sees. I put my boots on as the grass is already wet with midsummer dew and close the house door behind me.  I should be bathing my face in this dew according to folklore, not padding through it in my wellies.  The sky is still light and the swallows are still ...

My little rowan tree took a long time to get going in spring but now it is full of leaf and going-over flower.  It stands protectively just behind the shepherd's hut. There it is, just behind the chimney, growing up out of the hedge.  To the left of the hut the boundary is holly trees, somehow with an elder growing amongst them.  You can just see the white of the elder flowers in the tree. The tree is multistemmed.  I imagine that might be as a result of the young tree being cut down with the rest of the hedge when it was smaller so that it has branched out like coppiced hazel. There are two other rowans in the field but the others are single stemmed.  They are graceful trees like that but I also like the gently spreading shape of the multi stemmed one.  If anything for me that increases the protective nature of its presence. Look up into the canopy between the two largest trunks and you can see why rowan leaves appear in designs for fabric o...

We are not on top of the garden.  The garden is firmly and cheerfully on top of us, like a toddler giggling and sitting on your face.  I have decided that this will just have to be the way it is this year. When I look at our diaries and see how much of this spring and last autumn I have been in Devon and how much Ian has been either totally committed to looking after his father or in Manchester working or building a kitchen it seems fairly extraordinary that there is anything out there looking even faintly like a garden.  This much land gardened in this way needs time and it has not had that sort of time.  But it is June and things are flowering and growing and glowing with life so we are going to choose where and how to look. Look this way at the glory of the chives and the mint garden, where spearmint, applemint, basil mint, common mint, lime mint and peppermint jostle for space.  The more vigorous mints, the common mint and the basil mint being the worst...

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. ...