End of month view for May

Here is the side garden.  The hardy geraniums are blasting away, the peonies are just finishing and the poppies are about to come into flower. 

Come closer and you can see it all surging upward.

And closer still

Out in the field the daffodils are long since over, the apple blossom is gone but the wild flowers in the orchard are coming into flower.

You need to take the path to get in amongst them to see them properly.

This is fox and cubs which I mentioned in an earlier post.

Around them the ox eye daisies are just about to open, late I know to those who live lower down and further south.

A spire of self sown white foxglove pushes up through grasses and plantain.

The cutting garden is still more promise than plenty.  It will be good this year I hope.  Everything in it is timed to be in flower for Ian's birthday on 1st July.  I realise this makes me sound like a Chelsea wannabee and really it will flower whenever it wants to and the weather allows, but that is the hope.  Fingers crossed.

Here is the new bit with the native trees, looking rather empty still despite what feels like weeks of planting things out.  Somewhere in here are fourteen pulmonaria plants, courtesy of Jane, and endless hellebores, courtesy of Sarah Raven, and quite a hot of hardy geraniums from Malvern and from.
splitting up some of what I have elsewhere.  When it gets bigger I will show you.

And here is the kitchen garden.  The small black lump at the bottom of the picture is part of the head of my son and daughter in law's beautiful black labrador, Flora, who is staying for a fortnight.  I do think she deserves a photograph of her own.  I will have to work on that.

This is the kitchen garden looking back to the gate.  The tomatoes are all out in their pots.  We had better not get any frost now.

June is the best month in this garden which is some consolation for the ending of May.  So much happening, so much more to come.

Over the hills and a great way off....

A day off booked and in the diary and a weather forecast full of wind and rain.  I am going to visit Karen at Artist's Garden to see her and to look at her garden, last seen in cold and empty February.  The weather map on the BBC site shows a violent pulse of blue and green storm sweeping the North West corner of Wales in the morning.   After breakfast here in the North East corner it is windy, the air cool and brisk with the promise of rain, as I let the hens out, open up the greenhouse and decide that I will go, rain or no rain.

Westward, rising high on the Denbigh moors and the wind is snatching at the car.  It is too high and bleak here for trees.  Buffetted sheep huddle by piles of stones, pummelled by the wind.  I head down to the A5 and find the short cut through Ysbyty Ifan is closed to traffic.  The sainted sat nav sends me down towards Dolgellau.  As the car descends below the treeline there are branches on the road and new leaves whipping through the air, torn from the trees in violent handfuls.  The rain spits on my windscreen and, as I approach Blaenau Ffestiniog, the storm hits with full force.  For the next half hour I drive into a wall of water.  The wipers thrash but make no difference.  Occassionally a vehicle comes the other way, throwing up a tsunami of water as it passes.   A glimpse of scudding black water as I round a corner and I know I am driving along an estuary.  The rain closes back in.  I love it.

As I approach Harlech the storm begins to abate.  It is still raining heavily but grey stone houses and streets appear in the arc of the windscreen and the castle is clearly visible on the skyline through the rain.  Out to the west I know there are sand dunes and sea but the rain whisks me past them.  When I arrive at Karen's she puts on her waterproof to come out to say hello and we get drenched running from the car to the house.

The kettle is on.  A bulb catalogue is on the table and we immediately talk alliums.  She asks about my brother.  There is the somewhat surprising warmth of a friendship which would never have come into existence without blogging.  Ludicrously I now cannot remember the details of how I first met her face to face and how a connection forged on the internet moved on a stage.  That's daft.  It can't be more than two or three years ago so surely I should remember what happened but I don't, she feels like an old friend, like one of the friends I made years and years ago when my children were small.

It will be dry by one o' clock, I say.  We go out into the garden wrapped in fleeces as soon as the rain goes.  It is still grey and blustery and cold but the garden is bursting with peonies and new roses and the big empty bed by the wall is full of the promise of its late summer planting when she will open for the National Garden Scheme.  The new area for plant progation and plant sales is up and running, full of plants and temptation, some bought in, most grown from seed or cuttings.  The vegetable garden, now under the supervision of shedman, is immaculate and about two weeks further along than ours.

Blown back inside,  we have lunch and then the sun comes out and things need looking at and thinking about all over again, so out we go again into the glittering garden.  We talk about my garden as well as hers, other people's gardens, other people, whether or not it is worthwhile for those who live where we do to be members of the RHS (verdict: only if you want, as I did a couple of years ago, to go back and back to a local RHS garden over six months of so, to help you with your thinking about seasons.  It is a worthy organisation but it is way too South East centric).  We laugh quite a lot.  She gives me some erigeron daisies and a huge gift of plants from Dobby's garden which includes a fabulous number of pulmonaria seedlings.  Jane (Dobby) must have known that my obsession at the moment is beautiful, complicated ground cover.   I doubled the width of what I always think of as my native tree walk, grandiosely if you saw it.  It needs the spaces between the now establishing trees and the newly planted shrubs woven together in a tapestry of shifting shape and colour.  The plants need to sit in their setting of overgrown field against the backdrop of hills and valleys.  So many things would not do.  Pulmonaria are just right.

I look at my watch for the first time in hours and the day is almost gone.  How does this happen?

Time to go.

The drive back is in sun and glittering light.  Light bounces off the sea and the estuary and the trees shimmer with rain-caught sun.  I think about stopping to take some photographs but I am keen to be home again to Ian and my father in law so, as this morning, I simply keep on driving.  You will have to imagine it.

And home to smoked mackerel and new potatoes and the marmalade cat and later a glass of red wine.

Seize the day.

Exercise

I went to Malvern.  I took some pictures and thought some thoughts but I have read a number of Malvern blogs now and don't think I have anything much to say that hasn't been very eloquently said already.  I can tell you that Monty Don is not as tall as I thought he was, that I don't like blackboards and lava lamps in gardens, that there were fewer nettles and wildflowers in this year's show gardens than there were last year.  This last observation is a bit sad as I had felt very on trend last year.  I wasn't too keen on the garden dominated by a pterodactyl, although it did include some shapes of real beauty.  I could have moved into the Garden for Life and lived there.  Malvern's version of the Wicker Man was truly fantastic.

So I am going to tell you about my lifelong changing relationship with exercise, just because I have been thinking about it.

When I was a child I used to run down the road along the edge of the common and know that I was running like the wind.  I could feel the road disappearing under my feet and my legs eating up the miles.  I knew I was uncatchable.  So it was a bit of a shock when school sports day came round and I found I was generally labouring along somewhere near the back of every race.  It can put you off, that kind of thing.

During secondary school I became adept at exercise avoidance.  I hated the way that playing hockey involved getting blue legs and a red nose and enduring those shuddering shocks when, having accidentally got the ball, I would be tackled by the hearty, hefty thighed girls who actually cared about whether their team won.  I sunbathed by the changing rooms in tennis and wandered along languidly at the back in cross country.  I perfected a technique of always being at the back of the queue for any piece of equipment in the gymnasium.   I was every P.E. teacher's nightmare.

It wasn't that we were couch potatoes at home.  We walked, we swam, I cycled miles to school every day and played badminton with my best friend in the garden.  It was organised sport I disliked, especially anything involving a ball and any form of team game.  So in my twenties I gloried in doing no formal exercise whatsoever, except the running around which accompanies having small children.  In my thirties I discovered the gym and was astonished to find that I loved it, especially weights, and for ten years of so I was a serious, regular, at least three times a week  gym bunny.  I loved the fact that exercising a lot meant I could eat what I liked, having always had a large appetite and a real love of food.  I couldn't imagine ever stopping. 

In my forties I began to walk quite seriously, hill walking mostly.  When the rest of my life was spent at a desk, I needed to keep going to the gym to be fit enough to walk up hills.  I took up jogging too, running would be too strong a word for it.  I was never going to be quick but I could cover distance, slowly, my mind running free too.  Gradually running took over from going to the gym.  I thought I had become someone who would always exercise.

And then we came here and I became ill.  I lost six months to illness and incapacity and lost a ton of weight too.  When I finally went back to work I was eating my way back up to my normal weight, and kept on eating until I had reached it and passed it and carried on upward and somehow didn't start exercising again.  Why not? I am not sure.  There is a lot to do here and no gyms within easy reach.  It always seems more sensible to go out into the garden than to get in a car and drive to a gym.  Running is hard work here, living so high on the edge of a hill.  You can't go anywhere from the house without going steeply up or steeply down.  It's probably great running country if you are an athlete.  If you are an overweight middle aged woman who hasn't run for a few years, it's all a bit terrifying.

I did start walking again and celebrated leaving my job and taking a leap into the unknown by walking the Offa's Dyke Path which runs for 177 miles along the whole length of Wales.  That is a couple of years ago now.  I loved it, the easy rhythm of the days: breakfast, walk, lunch, walk, stop, shower, evening meal, sleep the sleep of the truly tired.  By the time we had finished I just felt I could have gone on walking for ever.  Last year we walked for two weeks in the Austrian Alps in July.  That was a huge challenge and I was only just beginning to feel fit enough to do it by the time we came home.

And somehow we get to this year.  I look back and see that as an adult I have done a lot of exercise and taken a lot of pleasure from it, astonishing though that would be to my teenage self.  But somehow I am going into this summer a stone overweight, hopelessly unfit, having fallen into a pattern of coping with these last few months with the help of another glass of wine or piece of cake. 

I think I will do something about it. 
I wonder if I can?

May, doing too much, stuff

Today I drove the border between England and Wales, a glorious green journey.  I stopped and drank coffee from a flask in a layby full of lorries, overlooking fields singing with vivid blocks of green and gold, the Black Mountains of Wales rising away towards the horizon, half hidden by scuds of rain against the sunshine.

I thought about family.  My brother is still in hospital, four months on from his stroke.  Today he made me laugh and, driving home when no one could see, made me cry.  I marvelled at his wife's strength and his own determination to hold onto himself.

I thought about all the things I am doing and not doing, gathering in lists of duty and interest and clamour.  I will carve out time to plant things and to weed endlessly, mindnumbingly, and have been mining for hogweed root in the native tree walk and planting hardy geraniums.  I will cook and clean and prepare the cottage and talk to my parents and children on the phone.  Somehow I have not rung the bank or sold things on ebay.

There is Malvern from Wednesday.  That will be good. 

Rain, wine, friends, cake

Rain - teasing me, throwing drops on the greenhouse roof, darkening the flags, tossing the twisted willow, passing over leaving the sweetpeas still gasping.

Wine - a glass by myself, FIL sleeping, my visiting parents in the cottage, Ian away.  Cliche tells you drinking alone is a bad thing, this feels like entirely earned luxury.

Friends - a day snatched yesterday from normal life with people I would not have met without blogging but who are now woven into my life.  Lots of laughter, some sounding off, driving home smiling.

Cake - made two lemon cakes which sank spectacularly.  Tasted wonderful as had to fill the hole with icing.

End of month view for April

So much dry weather and, over the last few days, so much wind.  With our stony free draining soil my garden is desperate for rain.  Today we will do things in order.  Come out of the kitchen door with me and turn left into the side garden.  Ignore, if you can, the lengths of cast iron guttering piled on the rotting table, waiting to be painted and giving a gentle air of Steptoe and Son to the area by the door.

Here is the side garden, oddly quiet and green just now.  The hellebores are still holding on to their flowers in the foreground but the daffodils and tulips have all gone over and the peonies and the oriental poppies which will be the next overflowing of colour have not yet started.

So most of what is happening is foliage: fennel and hellebore and dicentra here.   For the first time that I can remember it was obvious today that the hellebores and peonies were wilting in the searing wind, after weeks of dry weather.  I always mulch in here in spring and that is usually enough but I watered today for the first time in the face of flagging foliage.  The peony buds are fat and full of promise.  I can't bear to see the plants struggling for water.

Come through the gate and into the field.  The apple trees are in bloom in the little orchard.  I have cut a path through the grass so that you can  walk in among the wild flowers, or at least you could if there were any!  The native daffodils have finished now and the tiny naturalised tulips are going over too.  There will be ox eye daisies in here, some foxgloves, sweet rocket, fox and cubs and all the range of grasses.  All the wildflower plugs that I grew from seed last year are flourishing but the numbers were just swallowed up by the area and by the grass.  There are never enough.  I have bought some yellow rattle which is parasitic on grass so should weaken the competition and I have also treated myself to some more tiny plug plants from Jan Miller at Saith Ffynnon Plants (Seven Wells).  Jan specialises in plants which encourage butterflies.  I am trying to establish a perennial meadow, not a cornfield full of cornflowers and poppies which would not be easy to grow up here on the hill.  The hedges and verges are full of stitchwort and bluebells and will soon be frothing with cow parsley.  Every time I have found any native wildflower growing in the onion beds or anywhere else that I try to keep well weeded, I have transplanted it to here.  We will see what the meadow's second summer will bring.

Come down the path between the apple tree and the tiny mulberries and turn left towards the cutting garden.

There is not much to see here either (do you see a theme developing?).  The tulips which have been the staple flower for spring have finished and the annuals which are waiting in the cold frames have not yet gone out.  On the netting, tiny sweetpea plants are struggling to stay alive in the driest spring for decades.  I have sunk 3 inch pots next to each pair of plants in the hopes of helping them to take water down at the roots.  Watered from above, the water vanishes in a second, leaving the baked ground looking as dry as before. 

Come and have a look at the native tree walk.  You can see the cornuses and the bigger trees which have been in for three years.  The new shrubs for this year, witch hazel, daphne, viburnum farreri and viburnum opulus, osmanthus and all the ground cover geraniums and violas are all just clinging on here.  Why did I not know how dry it would be when I started putting these in during March? You can see the wind in the picture, whipping the new growth on the cornus.  More watering required.

Come back out of the field, past the end of the cottage garden and out onto the sunny bank.  From a distance you cannot see how beautiful the irises are.  They love it here, baking in the sun.  Alongside, the pinks are full of buds and the valerian is ready to burst into flower.  No need for watering then.

In the kitchen garden only onions and broad beans are out in the beds but the hellebore argutifolius is in glorious flower, there are the first of the peonies, alliums and the heady smell of sweet cicely.  The new mint bed with its edging of chives and pinks is hanging on.  Watering needed here too.

Would you mind too much if I asked for a day or two or gentle but relentless rain?