welsh hills again

I am sure that when I lived in a city winter was never this dark!  The clocks went back this weekend and suddenly the glorious extended autumn hit the buffers.  I looked out of the window at half past five, the lights having been on in the house for ages, and saw the black night.  Partly it is the totally welcome absence of light pollution here.  Stand in just the right place on our land and you can see the faint amber smudge of light which is Mold to the East but turn your back on that and the valley is very black.  You can't see the line of the ridge opposite or of the ancient hillforts to the west against the sky.  Look up and on a clear night you can see stars, but wander around and it is can't-see-the-hand-in-front-of your-face dark on nights when the moon is, as tonight, a waxing crescent.  It is close to total darkness. We go out to the pub for a meal, driving our narrow lanes between the high hedges.  In the headlights the browns and gol...

Who am I? Daughter, nearly a year on from the sudden death of my mother, trying to support my father as he falls away into motor neurone disease, holding on to the self they created in their parenting of me: happy, resilient, loving, amused and amusing.  This self is buffetted hard by the rain and wind of loss and sadness but she still stands up, most of the time.  Thank you Mum and Dad for that. Wife, sharing with my husband the loss of his father and receiving his help with my own demands.  Torn by living in one place and loving in another.  Having his company on the road as the miles pile up under the wheels.  Needing to find time to focus on each other Mother and stepmother, feeling at the moment most strongly myself when I talk to my daughter and my son, loving their deep sympathy and understanding, their practicality, watching them in their turn parenting their children and seeing how totally they are adult, responsible not only for themselves but ...

I have always loved cyclamen.  When we first came here nearly nine years ago I longed to establish cyclamen, both autumn flowering cyclamen hederifolium and February flowering cyclamen coum.  I must have bought ten plants of each variety and most of those have simply disappeared.  I longed for them to naturalise and to fill the dry shade under the tree in the side garden but it seemed that only one or two hung on.   Then suddenly this autumn I saw the slender flowers gathering quietly under the tree, certainly twice the size of last year's patch.  Now the flowers are going over and the equally beautiful marbled leaves are patterning the dry soil.  I love them.  They can double and treble and multiply to their hearts' content and I hope they will.  This is an image from the RHS which perfectly captures the delicacy of the flowers. I have written before about Plant me Now , an online plant sales business, and I have always been impressed with t...

I have been wandering about through my September photographs.  2009 seems to have been a great season for mushrooms in our garden.  It's interesting how the harvests vary from year to year and how easy it is to forget.  This year is the season of damsons and tons and tons of autumn raspberries. In September 2010 I find we were visiting our friends in Provence, driving through the Camargue and wandering the glorious stone buildings of Avignon.  I find bulls and white horses and stone streets and a brightness of light that is rare here in North Wales. In September 2011 our then nearly two year old grandson was busy playing trains.  What has changed?  He and his family have moved house and acquired land and pigs and he has grown tall and gone to school.   He still likes trains as a nearly five year old but the trainlines have become extraordinarily complex! Oh look, in 2012 I went to Nant Gwrtheyrn , the Welsh language centre on the beau...

The mornings are misty just now.  Not a grey, damp mist but a pearly sheen of mist with the sun somewhere behind it, silvering the sky. It has been a perfect September day.  We have been working in the garden, Ian cutting some of the hedges and a lot of grass while I have cut back what feels like thirty wheelbarrows full of the self seeders which we like to have here but which take over the world if you let them seed: campanula, artemisia, alchemilla, feverfew.  I love them all but left to seed all over the place they squeeze out practically everything else. The whole garden is overflowing with harvest.  This summer has not been one for the garden as you can probably tell by the way it has not appeared in the blog.  But just now it doesn't seem to matter that we lost it under the demands of other things.  There has been a fantastic harvest of damsons. There are now twenty six jars of jam on the shelves, waiting for winter.  Damson jam is one of ...

Last Sunday my father in law died peacefully in our local hospital, aged ninety-five, from kidney failure.  Four days earlier he had slipped into deep unconsciousness and we knew he could no longer be treated.  From then on Ian and I, hugely supported by our son and daughter and their partners, who live reasonably locally, kept him company night and day. Our other adult children, who live far away, provided their own support by phone and text.  How does anyone manage these things without the loving support and care of adult children, I wonder?  When my mother died last year I felt it too: we were not alone, the next generation were with us, taking their share, looking after us in their turn.  It is a good feeling.  I felt as I do now about blogging when my mother died. Partly I did not want to blog.  There are some things which need privacy.  But I also knew that if I did not mention something so important, if I blogged about gardens or lemo...

One day I will spend a whole summer by the sea.  I will lie on blankets on the sand and paddle with children and eat slightly sandy sandwiches.  I will walk along cliff tops.  I will watch the tide come in.  When I was a teenager I used to spend days on the beach with my best friend, Ruth.  If you spend enough time on a particular beach you come to know what is revealed when the tide goes out, the places where the water lingers and becomes sunwarmed pools.  You know how the sand behaves, where it ripples and where it hardens, where it goes soft suddenly underfoot.  When the tide comes in again you know where the water goes suddenly cold, where the sand holds out in little islands against the rising water. I must go down to the sea.