Walking away that inside out feeling

Sometimes you just find yourself feeling a bit inside out, like a cat with its fur stroked the wrong way, a grumpy toddler, an awkward old lady.  At the end of today I felt peopled out.  A few days with primary responsibility for my father in law and my grandson, love them both dearly though I do, coupled with the expectation of a further week full of friends and family coming and going, suddenly made me feel crowded in upon and oppressed.

This always puzzles me.  When I have done the tests that corporate life throws at you on odd occasions such as  the Myers Briggs which looks at various aspects of your personality, I always come out as an extrovert.  And it is true that I love people and today had a great lunch with some very good friends we had not seen in ages and loved the chat and was energised and delighted by their company.  And yet, as tonight, I can quite suddenly feel the wind change. The demands of other people seem too much.  The compromises which life requires suddenly make me want to scream.  The sense of eating food that suits other people, moving at a pace which is not my own - as slowly as my father in law, as relentlessly five-year-old-fast as my grandson - accommodating things in my house I do not want, being patient, being kind, being stretched by all the things I want to do for all the parts of my family who are not right here, right now, makes me feel pulled tight as a guitar string.  I need to go away or I will burst or break. 

So we went for a walk, the normal walk, along the track, up the hill, towards the ridge, shining in the sunlight on a still spring evening.

There are calves up in the field by the track.

As we approach they all turn their heads to look at us.  They are so delicate, so beautiful.  Adult cows are big beasts, lumbering, huge.  Calves are oddly fragile, more like deer somehow.

Up at the top of the hill, a lamb is playing hide and seek behind a tree.  The whole act of walking and looking is calming -  one foot in front of another, the road rising, the bluebells in bloom in the verge, across the field the lambs having their mad half hour, racing around and careering back to their mothers.

Back home, the fur beginning to lie flat, I wander the garden, closing up the greenhouse, watering pots, inspecting the sweetpeas which have struggled in the heat.  Today I dug watering ducts into the soil by the sweetpeas, toilet roll insides for most of them, 3 inch pots when I ran out of toilet rolls.  Ian had watered them in.  I watered all the big pots and some wildflower plugs I bought today.  I looked at all the plants I have been moving down to the native tree walk, some happy, some clearly short of water, and lugged watering can after watering can down the field to those plants that needed them.

It started to get dark but I didn't want to go in.  The apple blossom glowed in the dusk and I realised I had  my camera in my pocket.

The cat arrived, wondering what was going on.

And decided to make its contribution.

Before retiring

So I shall take Anna Pavord's The Constant Gardener to bed and all will be well.

Easter weekend baking

Since I got back from Oxford I seem to have spent as close to every waking hour in the garden as possible.  Yesterday was another glorious, hot, sunny day, a day for suncream and gardening (a la Sarah Raven) not in jeans and boots but in an old skirt and flip flops. 

But today has been grey and cool, oddly pleasantly so.  I have been moving ground cover plants down to the native tree walk, things that get out of hand anywhere that you want to cultivate intensively but are gently green and satisfying on bare soil - tellima grandiflora, alchemilla, self sown forget me nots.  They have been wilting and sighing in the heat but today they settled back softly in the grey green light, last night's watering still keeping them green and full throughout the day.

I went seed sowing in the greenhouse again.  Ian has a big birthday coming up in the summer and I have become obsessed with having a celebratory garden.  I think this needs a blog to itself, or more, I could bore you rigid with it for weeks now that I see the potential!  I wonder if I have left it too late to make a glorious splash with annuals at the beginning of July?  What do you think?

And I also went baking.  We bake all our own bread, not through domestic god or goddessness but through greed,  so every week the small scale production line swings into action.

These, having their second rising in the tin, become these:

Five go into the freezer and become warm bread in the morning for the sake of two minutes in the microwave.

And one is normally eaten still warm with, if you are me, lots of salty Welsh butter.  "Have some bread with your butter, Mum" is a long-standing and reliable joke in our house.

But today I got carried away by Easterness and made these:

which meant that there was just no room for warm bread too.  Ian is away for a couple of days and should be back tomorrow.  I have eaten so many hot cross buns I need him to come back and save me from myself.  Along with all the other husbandly contributions to life of course.

April

At the moment I can hardly bear to come inside, or to go to work, or to do anything which takes me away from the garden.  Everything is growing: seedlings, perennials, bindweed, chicks.  The sun is warm, the grass is green.  I want to stop time and hold on to the moment but, since Professor Brian Cox himself says you can't - something about the Arrow of Time. I thought I understood it when he was speaking but it is gone, like so much  in my over full brain - my inadequate camera will have to do.

I plant tubs of tulips every year.  Last year was the first year I have ever been really pleased with them.  That was largely as a result of admiring some gorgeous pots in mountainear's garden and discovering that she used far more bulbs than I did.  This years are even better.

Out in the field the little orchard is looking more orchard like and these tiny tulips, tulipa linifolia, are spangling the grass before the wild flowers get going.  I love them.  They make my heart lift.

The cherry blossom in out in the orchard. 

The wild cherry is almost identical with just a little more delicacy in the flower.

The Light Sussex chicks which Ian hatched in the incubator, patiently turning the eggs three times a day, have gone outside today, leaving their cardboard box for the small run in the lush grass of the kitchen garden.

Here is the rogue black one, the classic black sheep, ugly duckling, odd one out.  I do hope it is a hen but it is too soon for us to tell.  They huddled in the house when moved outside, looking out through the pophole at the big world beyond.  Slowly, one by one, they ventured out for food and water and when I went to shut the popholes tonight they were all hanging about in the run like children reluctant to go inside.   Perhaps the freedom had gone to their heads.  The older hens in their own shed were already neatly lined up on their roost.

I love to see hens pecking about outside but it will be a while before the new chicks are let out of their run.  We have buzzards overhead here every day, wheeling slowly, mewing and soaring on the thermals, hunting the valley.  The chicks need to be a good deal bigger before they stop being a possible target for hunting buzzards.

There is so much to do.  It is good to stop, look, feel the sun on your shoulders watch chickens for a while.

Puppies, toddlers and knot gardens

This is a funny time to have a week away from home.  The garden is overflowing with things to do and having done a lot of freelance work in March I have been snatching time in the garden in April.  But sometimes other parts of my life call.

Younger daughter has got herself a puppy, a golden labrador straight out of the Andrex ad.  She is a thorough, forward planning, think things through kind of girl and had been planning and sorting out for this puppy for months.  In fact I suspect she has been wanting this puppy for most of her life and having a dog was part of her reason for making the big move from London to living in the country.  She took three weeks off work and I had arranged to come down for the first week she went back to be part of the transitional puppy care arrangements.

The sign is a warning for children about llamas.  Possibly the puppy should have a sign on her too as she is still at the puppy bitey and nipping stage.  M has read all the stuff about teaching bite inhibition, and lots else besides, and is doing fantastically well at teaching her that, along with sitting and waiting for her food and coming when she is called.  This is not to say that the days are not spent removing her from all sorts of great chewing opportunities and teaching her what is ok to play with - squeaky duck - and what is not - my laptop bag and my shoes, my everything really.

She is so utterly beautiful that she is pounced on by dog lovers wherever we go.  Having just removed her from the catflap,stopped her taking a book off the table and prevented her from chewing the hem of my jeans, I feel this blog should accompany the impossibly cute pictures with a big warning about the time and responsibility which attaches to having a puppy.  It's not all big eyes and cute tail waving!  I think even M who was as well prepared as you can imagine being, has found it harder than she expected although I am sure she wouldn't have it undone.

If you can't have your adult children living near you, one of the sad results of changing lives and changing work patterns over the last sixty years or so, then it is quite a good thing if they have the courtesy and organisational skills to live near each other so that you can visit more than one at a time!  Older and younger daughters live about half an hour's easy drive from each other and see each other quite frequently.  So I have managed to fit in visits to my older daughter and her family and some precious time with her toddler, who is also at the impossibly cute stage, all big blue eyes and curly fair hair and with a great tendency to find life hilarious.

He has learnt to climb the stairs and was keen to wave to me at every step to make sure I was paying attention.  He has a real liking for bubbles.

And sometimes even catches them.  He is a total delight although I have rather got out of the habit of looking after small children.  When did I ever read a thing when mine were small?  In fact, looking back, I think I just didn't.  That time was probably to blame for my continuing magazine habit, bite sized pieces to be fitted in when children slept or became temporarily transfixed.

And in some of the downtime where I was supposed to be leaving the puppy to get used to being by itself, I went to Waterperry and coveted this fabulous knot garden.

Quite funny really with puppies, toddlers and even gardens.  Everything worthwhile is a commitment.  Everything wonderful comes wrapped up in its own necessity for hard work, at least some of the time.  I think I may be on the point of coming up with a philosophy, if only I could spare the time to think about it.

End of month view for March

Slightly belatedly, here is the end of month view.  March has been dry, the driest for years. And the last few days have been warm, so that even these photos don't show what is in flower now.  Every time I go out something else is flowering.  That is what happens in Spring in a garden full of bulbs!

Here is the side garden.  The hellebores are still flowering, still beautiful after weeks and weeks.  The daffodils are out but since this photo was taken lots of tiny red tulips (Praestans) have popped up like scarlet flames. Pulmonaria is in flower too.  I love pulmonaria.  This is one of my favourites, Diana Clare, with silvered leaves which are beautiful in themselves and a vivid flower.

Out in the field the little orchard is beginning to fill.  The native daffodils have been flowering away for about three weeks and now the Thalia are coming to join them.

Up behind the swing the February Gold have flowered now and are beginning to go over.  The jonquil Sweetness is still in flower.  Daffodils have been a discovery for me since we came here.  I used to have a pretty broadbrush approach to daffodils: didn't like great big yellow trumpets, did like small delicate ones.  That was about it.  Then I started planting narcissus obvallaris, the native Welsh Tenby daffodil, moved on to the delicate white Thalia, fell in love with the old double variety, Tellamonius, and now love Jack Snipe, with its swept back Piglet ears, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, smaller and less sturdy than my beloved Tenby daffodil, and now Sweetness, with a clear, light, scent that smells of Spring.  I wonder if I can stop now or if next autumn will find me surreptitiously ordering in more?

At last something is happening in the cutting garden.  These yellow and red tulips are just coming into flower.  They are meant to be for the house but it is so lovely to see them there that I haven't cut any yet.  In one quarter the echinacea is just emerging from the soil, including, thankfully, the new echinacea White Swan, which I bought last year and thought I had lost in the cold.

Down on the native tree walk, the snowdrops are finished but more have been planted in the green.  I have put in winter aconites as well and the bed is being doubled in size to accommodate another witch hazel (Pallida), a Daphne Bholua (Jacqueline Postill), and an eleagnus for an evergreen "stop" to the border.  Still to go in are a viburnum farreri and another dogwood, Cornus sanguineus Midwinter Fire to balance the two which you can see in the foreground of this picture.  There are two hollies in here already and I think that another one will complete the shrubs and trees.  It is a big area and at the moment there is a lot of bare soil.  It is a bit of a leap of faith, planting trees and shrubs and holding the picture in your head when your eyes show you twiggy sticks and acres of soil, broken by the odd snowdrop and the inevitable creeping buttercup.  When the shrubs are all in I shall move loads of self sown forget me nots, alchemilla mollis and the wilder ground cover geraniums and see if that makes it all feel more furnished.

Here is the sunny bank, the quince tree coming into leaf, the daffodils in full flower.  The grass has had its first mowing since I took this picture so it all looks a bit more intentional!

I can't show you the kitchen garden as blogger seems not to want to upload any more photos right now so I will come back to it in a day or so.  This is the tidy time for the kitchen garden although more and more weeds are sneaking in.  I have broad beans planted out now and about half of the onion sets.  I need to sow salad stuff in the greenhouse and get started on peas and beans.

Whenever I go out I am assailed on all sides by things to do.  I know this happens every year in April and May and I feel almost overwhelmed by it all.  Doing this end of month view and writing this blog has been surprisingly soothing.  After a snatched hour in the garden this afternoon I was full of what needs to be done.  Reading this I am reminded of what we have done and of what is already happening, and what will happen whether I do it or not!  The next month will see an explosion of growth, both on this side of the hedges and out there on the other! The whole of the countryside is fountaining with life around me.

Projects!

Time for an update on the huge variety of projects which have been going on around here, quickly or, more honestly, slowly.

The roof was finished in January.  What kind of fool has his or her roof reslated over winter?  Well our kind, obviously.  The roofers did a great job.  Many days there were three generations of the same family working on our roof, the father coming out of retirement because it was an interesting job to do, his grandson now the fifth generation of his family to be a roofer.  Slate is a beautiful material.

 

I took this one before the scaffolding came down.  Beyond the house you can see one of the yew trees.  It almost makes you wish you could live up on the roof.

Ian built a lovely set of shelves which make the curved end of the worktop in the front kitchen.  Work on the back kitchen has stalled since my father in law came to live with us as the scale of the upheaval would be a bit daunting but the front kitchen is up and working and the truly gorgeous range cooker gives me pleasure every time I use it, even if only to poach an egg for my breakfast.

Our neighbours at the farm gave us some logs.  Aren't good neighbours a great thing to have?  This should keep us going for a bit!

And today the broad beans went out and about half the onion sets.  Yesterday the grass was cut for the first time.  The pots outside the cottage are bursting with daffodils and tulips.  Last night we went to Theatre Clwyd to see Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell with Robert Powell.  It is amazing to me that you can live somewhere as rural as this and still be able to see great theatre only twenty minutes away.  I laughed as much as I have for ages at Jeffrey Barnard, although to be honest you could cry as well at the waste of a life measured out in vodka glasses, but the writing is so swift and funny and the acting so witty and true that you just can't help falling for wondrous one liners that rattle past.  See it if you can.

The chicks are growing and cheeping and thriving upstairs in their cardboard box away from the cat.  Outside the grown hens are laying frantically, making up for the lull of winter.  My thoughts have turned outside to the garden.  Wouldn't it be lovely if you could just stay outside and potter for days and days?