End of month view

I seem to have been away for most of July, what with Oxford and daughter visiting, Dartmoor and parent visiting and Austria and puffing up mountains.  The garden has a dip in early July when lots of things get cut back and it all looks a bit bare and sad.  I know this is my own fault for letting oriental poppies take over and for loving the rush of spring and early summer so much that later summer gets neglected and I am trying hard to balance out my year a bit better.  I chopped back the hardy geraniums and the alchemilla and they are filling out again and there is a lot of cosmos grown from seed quietly filling in the gaps, but not yet really flowering.

Here is the side garden with the hens on the march in the bottom of the picture.  I often wonder, when I find a patch of scratched up seedlings or a flattened plant, how much better my garden would be if I didn't let the hens roam in it but I do think they add their own special something to the place.  They are lovely colours themselves and they make nice contented little noises and, really, this is not a place to be precious about damage, being so nearly just a bit of field and a veg patch.  The crocosmia lucifer is fountaining away in the back corner next to the fronds of fennel.  I think I shall have to have another clump on the other side of the fennel as it has great shape and foliage even when it is not in flower and the contrast with the feathery fennel, strappy lucifer and spikes of persicaria is one I really like.  It's only downside is that it takes up a lot of space.

Here is the cutting garden.  The phlox is flowering away and the echinacea is just coming.  The row of pinks smells warm and spicy in the sun as you pass.  I always grow lots of sweetpeas and this year is the best I have ever managed.  They smell wonderful too but are best when you have just cut them and put them in a jug.  I had a bit of a saga with sweetpeas this year.  I sowed some in November which were Sarah Raven varieties, a present from the lovely Zoe.  Every one was eaten by mice so I had to try again.  I used the heated propagator and got new ones going toward the end of February and then a warm spring and early summer meant that they were all flowering quite early.  These are Singing the Blues, Hi Scent and (typically) another variety where the writing washed off the label.  They have all had long stems and strongly scented flowers.  While we were away walking some began to set seed as the flowers weren't being picked often enough, so I have been going around every couple of days picking huge bunches for the house and the cottage and snipping off those which have begun to form seedheads.

Here is the cottage garden, lavender still going strong, lucifer flowering here too (I know it sounds odd with lavender but I promise you it looks ok with a buffer of silvery sedum) and the heads of the alliums making their bleached presence. 

Here is the sunny bank, in its own lull.  The irises and the opium poppies are over and the penstemons and sedums which will fill the middle of this space with a rich wine colour are only just beginning to come.

 And here is the kitchen garden, crying out for me to spend some time in it.  The onions have been lifted and are drying in the wooden greenhouse and the beds need properly clearing out and some more things sowing.  Somehow I managed not to sow beetroot earlier this year and I think I might just get away with getting some in now.  I will also sow more rocket and a variety of salad leaves.  In spring I sowed far too much of the same varieties of lettuce and some has bolted now and been pulled up today.  We just couldn't keep up with it, despite my practically making everyone have some shredded lettuce at every meal including breakfast.  I shall put small amounts of different salad stuff in this time.  In another month's time when the apples are ripening this garden looks wonderful but at the moment it is a bit heavy.

I think I might have to take my camera out again tomorrow and get some close ups of the combinations which are pleasing me to add to these more distant views.

Home again

I have never been walking in the Austrian Alps before so I was not ready for quite how stunningly beautiful it is.  This is the Lunersee, glowing like a turquoise far below us on our first day.

Neither was I ready for quite how hard much of the walking was. When you look at this picture and think that you have to get over some of these mountains, it is not really surprising.  I think I had just forgotten what real mountains are like, or put my head in the sand, overwhelmed by life before we went and just closing my eyes to the scale of the task.

Also we were carrying these:

although mine was much smaller than Ian's.  I had hoped for that magical moment which came on about day five of my Offa's Dyke Path walk last year when you lift your rucksack and it suddenly seems lighter and you start walking and think you could go on for ever.  Sadly it never came and I carried on grunting and puffing my way up the high hills. it is just the most extraordinary thing to be in such a landscape, slow or not.  To be honest, things did get easier as we went but I never achieved tripping around like one of these

This is one of Ian's photographs of a group of ibex which we found startlingly close to our path when we climbed Sulzfluh.  We came round a corner and found a small group.  I thought they would run as deer in Scotland would at the first hint of human contact.  But they stayed, wary but still, within camera range.  It is astonishing to see creatures so large and so strong surviving on what seems to be a landscape of stone.

The flowers are amazing.  I have hundreds of flower pictures but I don't want to bore you rigid.  To see so many things which you clearly recognise from your garden at home growing high and wild in alpine meadows is a revelation.  I am going to try lupins and doronicum up here on my own much lower hills now that I have seen them growing in their natural environment.

It is a world away from planes and trains and cities.  It is a world where humans have learnt to survive but where they seem to cling on to the edges, home not to men but to the ibex and the marmot, although there were plenty of Austrian and German walkers in the mountains: old folk and children as well as the superfit young, all tripping up and down the high paths and leaping streams.  They weren't yodelling.  The only yodelling we heard was here

on a sunny deck on top of a mountain by the cable car in the pretty village of Gargellan.  Here we also stayed in a small pension where the hospitality and the food were simply wonderful.  If you are ever in the Vorarlberg in Austria and want somewhere to stay, try the Wulfenia haus, run by the familie Bachman, just the perfect example of a small family run hotel.  They did our washing and gave us marvellous meals and comfortable beds, all with easy and genuine hospitality.

We didn't lose any weight, although we both got fitter over the fortnight.  I suspect that, just as the Offa's Dyke walk was powered by chips which led to my walking 180 miles and putting on two pounds, this one was powered by beer, not generally calorie free. Mostly we stayed in huts high in the mountains and all the huts also offer huge meals called "bergsteigeressen" (mountainclimbers' food) which are supposed to provide you with a guaranteed number of calories.  Spaghetti bolognaise was a favourite with me.  I was less keen on meals involving dumplings although the quality of food coming out of these high, isolated kitchens far away from roads and shops, where supplies came in on rickety pulley cars, was generally astonishingly good.

The paths are marked like this, from stone to stone, and those are my walking poles.  I have never used them before but am a complete convert now.  I am amazed, looking at this picture and wanting to walk right back into it, that I did it.
Now I need a holiday, perhaps a kitchen, and someone to help in the overgrown and overflowing garden.
It was good to go and it is good to be home.

Going on holiday

Right, so I am away for a couple of weeks.  We are going walking in the Austrian Alps.  Everything I need is in my rucksack, although I would admit that this sounds better than it is as Ian is carrying a rucksack twice the size and much of our joint stuff is in there.

Will I enjoy it?  I don't know.  I hope so.  We are walking with a group of people I know a little.  We are sleeping in Alpine mountain huts in shared rooms, like little dormitories.  I loved my walk last year when I walked the Offa's Dyke Path and I know I enjoy walking.  Last year I was setting the pace though and could go as slow as I liked!  I have never walked in Austria, only driven through on my way to Croatia marvelling at the high green pastures and the neatly stacked woodpiles.

We have had to call on kind friends and family to move in and look after everything while we are away and the place is full of notes and lists.  The garden is full of things which are nearly ready to harvest and of things which are shouting at me for attention.  It is quite hard to tear myself away.

But off we go: car to Manchester, plane to Zurich, train into Austria, cable car up a mountain and then legs and feet.  No blogging, no twitter, no emails.

Sometimes, love home however much you do, it is good to get out more.

See you soon.

Walk on Dartmoor

I am spending a few days with my parents as my dad has had a replacement hip operation.  Mornings are spent shopping and eating cheese scones, and afternoons, while my parents have a small sleep, have been for walking their dog.  My sister and her family live not far away up on Dartmoor so we have gone together, catching up, talking, putting the world to rights.

It is hard to describe the beauty of Dartmoor.  My home hills are a long high ridge, running South to North along the edge of the lush Vale of Clwyd.  While the hills are high and crowned with iron and bronze age hillforts, the land is green, or purple with heather, the tops bare but the valleys clothed in trees or grazed by sheep and cows.  Dartmoor is not much higher but bare and wild.  I love these hills too: the tors and the streams and the tiny wooded valleys with their ancient trees.

We walk up to a big curve in the stream where my sister's dog loves to swim.  He is a labradoodle, a huge dog, nearly as big as a wolfhound.  He adores water and leaps in but my parents' collie is much less struck. She sits quietly next to us while he plunges in, ears and tail waving.  It is a perfect day, warm and still and we sit on rocks and talk while the dog swims back and forth.  It would be entirely peaceful here in this big open bowl of moorland, were it not for the hugely energetic splashing of the dog as he goes by again.

"It's like sitting next to a small paddle steamer" my sister says.

Out of the water he shakes and rolls but my camera isn't fast enough to catch him.

We walk on, heading up a steep path towards Belstone Tor.  It is very hot.  My face reddens and my breath gets short.  My sister is much fitter than I am but I am supposed to be walking in the Alps next week so it would be a poor do if I couldn't get up here.  The dogs run and potter backwards and forwards, looking as though they could go for miles.

A skylark sings above us.  We get to the top of the rise and turn through a gap in the stone wall heading for the tor.  Everything is hot and still with the view shimmering away into the heat.  A tiny ripple of breeze stirs against my hot cheek.

From the top the whole of Devon stretches away into the heat haze.  

The rocks are enticing, rocks for sitting on, playing in, hiding in.

Rocks with a history and a purpose, although they don't share it with us.

We sit for a while and turn and go down.  There are children to be picked up from school, emails to check, ordinary life to be lived, but the hot, high, stillness comes down with me for a while.

Living the dream?

We meet some lovely folk who stay in the cottage.  After all, if you choose to come here you are not after noise and fleshpots and potted entertainment but comfort and quiet and a dose of rural bliss.  Whether it is families with young children who love opening the cottage door and letting them run in the field or couples who sit on the bench with a glass of wine watching buzzards soaring and looking into the view, it is not at all uncommon for people to tell me that I am living their dream.  It's a perfectly sensible thing to say - I'm living my dream too for that matter!  The place, the garden, the ancient house, the hens, the self sufficiency.  It's all pretty damn lovely.
But it's not all moonlight and roses you know.  I thought it was time to show you some of the grot as well.

So here is the dream, although I expect you have got the idea:

And here is the not so dreamlike.  The kitchen is plastered and painted.  No electrics yet.  Not much of anything else yet to be honest.  The bright orange plastic thing on the table is a fairly tacky pinball machine described by four year old grandson as "I think I need  my computer".  It would have been even worse if I had shown you the old kitchen we are moving out of but it is such an unmitigated disaster area I couldn't bring myself to photograph it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the waste and desolation that follow the cutting back of the oriental poppies.  There are supposed to be dahlias and cosmos in there getting ready to pick up the baton but behind them is an exhausted phlomis staggering dazedly into the light and a pittosporum Tom Thumb which has lost its colour and most of its foliage while the poppies were making their bid for world domination.  Note to self: do not be tempted to keep too many poppies when the bed looks empty and sad in spring.  Pull the blighters up, or some of them at least.  It's so hard to do.  Perhaps I should start an oriental poppy nursery, or nurserylet.

 

 

This table came out of the utility last year and has proved to be that lethal mixture of heavy and useful which makes things stay put.  I have sort of stopped seeing it now, a bit like the boxes on the landing and the nettles in the field.  At least I suppose nobody else sees it either but it is hardly the dream now is it?

I could have carried on with large scale weeds and the paperchase which is my study and the dustbaths which the hens have created which I have to edit out of lush garden shots, but I got distracted by this and then I thought that I won't show you any  more.  You might not come again.