welsh hills again

Yesterday was a day full of movement: dance class in the morning (and yay!  I have finally cracked hulahooping), a walk and some gardening in the afternoon and yoga class in the evening.  I don't want you to think this is my normal programme.  Usually if I aim to do even one of those things I feel I am doing ok and don't attempt to fit in anything else.  But yesterday for some reason I just like felt like moving and I am glad I did. Today is a more sedentary day, even though I keep reminding myself that sitting is the new sugar.  I started the day with a visit to the dentist and the hygeinist.  I might as well be honest about this.  I don't mind the dentist because he generally doesn't find anything to do but I really don't like going to the hygeinist.  This is not the fault of the hygeinists themselves who are all lovely.  I am a wimp.  I don't like the scraping and the pushing my mouth about and the sense that there are more things i...

Every day I have done a small thing in the garden, unless I have been away in which case I have tried to give it some thought.  The greatest difference it is making at the moment is to the way I notice it.  A peony opening, a bit of bindweed twining through the salvias, a tiny bluetit chirping in the hedge: there is something about the daily engagement which makes me see it all. Today I have put geraniums in the pots by the holiday cottage door and begun to seriously harden off the cosmos seedlings which I bought from Sarah Raven. I whisked through the side garden removing tiny heads of nettles which were poking up between the hardy geraniums.  Then I sat for a few minutes, listening to the garden, birds and pollinators and the distant hum of my neighbour's tractor. From my seat the alliums and the orange geum clash gloriously. Looking back towards the house, more alliums are clashing with the smyrnium and the side garden is only days away from erupting int...

Still here, still doing the project!  Life has got a bit busy so that it has been a bit of a stretch both doing the project and recording it have  so here is a bit of a catch up. On Wednesday I went to Chelsea Flower Show which I decided to regard as part of the project, since thinking about the garden is a necessary part of gardening it.  Chelsea is an interesting conundrum.  The beauty and perfection of the show gardens is another world and the transient nature of what they produce is very different from what we try to do as gardeners with a garden which we live in and with the whole year round.  And yet it produces moments of delight and beauty as you clamber through the crowds. This is from one of artisan gardens which I like a lot for their small scale and accessibility.  I was struck this year by how often I was attracted by the hard landscaping as much as the planting.  Perhaps I am turning into Ian. I love this slate sphere and woul...

Yes! Past the half way mark!  There have been tiny bits in the garden since I last posted, mostly watering and the kind of weeding where you wander past and pull one thing up.  And no working in the garden today because today I am off to some meetings this morning and then down to London in late afternoon to go to the Chelsea Flower Show tomorrow, thanks to an invitation from a friend. I am leaving the garden alive with all sorts of bees and blossom.  When you walk around there are places where the noise of insects beats joyously around your head. I am really looking forward to Chelsea.  I went two or three years ago with the same friend and we had a great day.  The trick for me to Chelsea is not trying to relate what you see to your own space all the time, instinctive although that is.  That is much easier to do when you live somewhere like I do where the garden is high and wildish and grows what it wants to grow rather than some vision of an Englis...

Just a short time in the garden this morning before heading off for the weekend. This is a part of the garden I haven't shown you much although in many ways it is my favourite part (when other parts aren't).  We planted a bed of native trees parallel to the hedge at the bottom of the field.  Besides bird cherry, rowan, birch and whitebeam there are dogwoods, a daphne and a magnolia which doesn't really belong there but had to go somewhere.  It seems to blend in ok, just drawing attention to itself for the short glorious burst of flowering before fading back into the background. The trees are underplanted with hellebores, hardy geraniums and pulmonaria.  In spring there are lots of snowdrops and primroses.  Theoretically this bed looks after itself but actually grass invades occasionally and of course the ubiquitous creeping buttercup.  But it is probably the best place in the garden for looking after itself.  I spent a bit of time this morning t...

The project is going well.  Even on the days when I don't get time to document what I am doing I am managing to do something, somehow, somewhere in the garden. Today I have been admiring the way the sweet cicely has chosen to sow itself in amongst the peony.  They are such a happy partnership.  I have also been potting on my seedlings from Sarah Raven. I decided that the answer to my cutting garden conumdrum this year would be to buy in some annual seedlings for the squares which I haven't yet filled.  I have twenty seedlings of four different varieties of cosmos: Dazzler and Double Click Cranberry, both carmine pink, one single flowered, one double, and Purity and Psyche White, both white, again one single and one semi double.  As usual I have bought far too many so these will do my cutting garden, the gaps in the side garden and should still leave a few left over for my daughter in law who is starting a brand new garden in their new house. I also boug...

There was very little time for the garden today as I had a whole load of Spanish to do for my OU course and granddaughter visiting booked for this afternoon.  So I contented myself with a great deal of watering.  Watering isn't generally a problem here in North Wales but we have had a dry few days and there are lots of new things which have been planted and various things in pots waiting to go to my daughter in law's new garden.  The soil is so stony that it drains at great speed when the rain stops and until plants get their roots down they need a little help. So first of all I watered all the new perennials which went in last week and over the weekend: the foxgloves, hollyhocks, violas, and catmint.  Then I watered pots of hardy geranium and clematis for Lindsay.  Finally I moved to the little wooden lean to greenhouse: I can't take any credit at all for what is in here.  Ian has taken over responsibility for the growing of food.  He has sown ...