A year in the life of a tree

Over at Patiopatch Laura is recording a year in the life of a wych elm.  Recording requires close looking and I thought I would join in if only to ensure that I really looked at my trees.  Trees are crucial but it is easy to regard them as a pleasant backdrop to the real business of flowers.  That might be so in a tiny courtyard garden where it is possible to control everything but my garden is so close to natural landscape that you could lose the flowers (sadly) and retain a sense of the place but lose the trees and it would become a wasteland.

The first question was which tree to choose.  I was tempted by one of the huge oaks beyond the field or a towering ash but in the end I decided to restrict myself to trees on our land.  The big sycamore at the bottom of the drive is a lovely tree.   I know people are snotty about sycamore: it is not a native, and not even as old an incomer as the field maple which was brought in by the Romans.  But the tree has a comforting bulk about it and in spring the shrimp pink of the new leaves is fleetingly as lovely as any flower.  But for quite a lot of the year it doesn't do very much except loom large and green.

I considered the yew trees at either end of the house.  I love them, bookending the house with their stately enigmatic presence, but even more than the sycamore they do not change. The dark evergreen foliage hangs calmly down with only the rush of red berries in autumn to bring the thrushes in.

The apple tree in the field would be a good one with the delicate pink of the blossom in spring and the huge flushed fruit in autumn but I look at that anyway.  I wanted something which I could neglect but should celebrate.

So here it is, a horse chestnut in the hedge line on the field boundary.  It doesn't look that exciting I suppose.  It is quite a young tree so has not yet attained the towering presence of a mature tree.

Come closer and you can see the distinctive upward thrust of the branches.  Trees without their leaves reveal things about their character.  The ash hangs and in winter, without the delicate many fingered foliage, looks messy and shabby.  The dense twiggy structure of the head of an oak tree produces a rounded, proud shape.  Silver birch is skinny and twiggy but still graceful.  The horse chestnut in winter throws itself toward the sky in an echo of the towering candles of flower which it will carry in the spring.

The bark is silvery grey, pale and smooth without deep cracks and fissures because this is a young tree.

The buds will swell over the coming weeks but they are already sticky and shining in the sun.

So there it is: our horse chestnut in January, waiting to burst into life.

Thinking about the garden

Gardening in January is a miserable thing.  Paths are muddy, soil is cold,  and all those things you didn't cut down in the autumn so as to be wildlife friendly and which you hoped would stand whorled with frost against a low sun droop and drip sadly in a soggy, bedraggled tangle.  All the talk about winter gardens and structure which you can ignore in the summer when your garden is flowering its socks off comes back to haunt you.  Yes you do need the hardlandscaping and paths you can't find the time or money to sort out.  Yes indeed, you should have more evergreens.  I usually cope with January by staying inside by the stove.  This year in particular I have been knitting.

I made a Moebius cowl, partly because I loved my first neck warmer so much and partly because I have always been fascinated by the Moebius strip which apparently has no beginning and no end.  Actually knitting one was amazing.  I still don't really understand how it works as you knit it on a doubled circular needle.  It seems as if you cast on in what becomes the middle of the cowl and as you work the cowl becomes deeper and deeper, each new row adding to both the bottom and the top of the coil.  Still no wiser?  No, I wasn't either.  I just followed the instructions with my mouth open in amazement.

Then I made a cable cowl which is probably my favourite of the three.  It is very soft and warm and the cable pattern is deeply satisfying to knit.  Both these patterns came from a fabulous website called ravelry  If you are at all interested in knitting take a look.  There is a vast selection of patterns and yarns to look at, many of the patterns are free, and it has transformed me from a clumsy knitter who had done nothing for twenty years or so into a person who can make things she actually wants to wear.  The latest project is a cardigan for me, the first full size garment I have made since I was about sixteen when I laboured for months over a jumper which ended up so saggy and baggy that I nearly cried with disappointment and never wore it.  When I am not knitting I have my fingers crossed about this latest endeavour.  So far so good.  If you never see a picture of it you will know it was another disaster.

But today I have worked in the garden, the first garden day of the new year.  We are looking after our son's dog for a week so I had to take her for a walk this morning and that set me off feeling like being outside again. A well behaved dog is a good companion in the garden, lying peacefully alongside when I was cutting back hellebore leaves so you can see the newly emerging flowers, snuffling about in the field, occasionally  disappearing off to check the corner of the field where the badgers come through or turning up hopefully with a stick for a quick game of retrieve.  I cut back a lot of lank perennials and everything in the side garden at least looked better for it.  There were places I didn't even get to and there was the usual rush of reminders of how very much there is to do out there but there were snowdrops pushing through and arum leaves gleaming in the weak sun.

I don't think there are as many snowdrops as usual this year although I haven't yet done my totally anal snowdrop count.  I wonder if they dislike the milder winter we have had so far.  Certainly last year when the hard December snow went  huge clumps of them emerged in January although I didn't do my usual job of splitting the clumps to encourage them to spread.  It was wonderful to find quite how much space I have for more bulbs in the new bed at the bottom of the field although I couldn't find any of the winter aconites I planted last year.  Should they be out now?

I think I might be ready to go outside again.

Time

A few weeks ago Karen at An Artist's Garden blogged about time: not having enough of it, finding it all used up on some of the things she loves while other things she wants to do are forgotten and undone.  Judging from the number of comments made, she struck a chord with a lot of us.  

I have always been obsessed with time.  I remember as a teenager reading Andrew Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress"

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down and think which way

To walk,and pass our long love's day;

Thou by the Indian Ganges'side

Shouldst rubies find;

I by the tide Of Humber would complain.

I would Love you ten years before the Flood;

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires, and more slow.

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear 

Time's winged chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long preserv'd virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust.

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may;

And now, like am'rous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour,

Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.

Let us roll all our strength, and all

Our sweetness, up into one ball;

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Thorough the iron gates of life.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

It made me shiver.  I felt a delight in the words - the vastness of the vegetable love which for some reason I always saw as a huge cauliflower, the tearing of pleasures through the iron gates of life - shivered over with a ferocious and crushing sense of how brief life is.  The sardonic young man who had pressed his lover with the deliciously cruel couplet:

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none I think do there embrace.

was himself dead.  Everything passes in the blink of an eye.  This life that I was standing on the threshold of was so brief as to be practically meaningless.

It didn't last, that trembling sensation.  I don't suppose it could have done without driving me nuts.  Life got in the way.  It speeded up and opened out like a river full of sailing boats when I went to university.  It slowed down to a crawl when my children were small and then the years whirled by in a flurry of work and childcare.  Now that the particular feverishness of that juggling is behind me I find increasingly that I do have again that tremulous awareness of how little time there is.  You can't look it full in the face.  It would strike you blind with fear, like the basilisk.  But you can feel it, as Marvell did, at your back, breathing coldly on your neck.  

Perhaps it is getting older that causes this, when the life to come is so clearly so much shorter than the life which has already gone.

Perhaps it is a leftover from when I was ill a few years ago and briefly looked at the prospect of stopping living, stopping when I was so far from ready.  Perhaps it comes from the impact of my brother's stroke and now my father's illness, making me so acutely aware of what they can no longer do and will not be able to do again.  Whatever it is I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to do with the time I have, perhaps not the most productive use of it!

I admire very much the way in which my aged FIL can take whatever pleasure each day provides for him, even though each day is much the same with its mealtimes and its walk and its television, a measured routine which he loves.  Yet that same routine can make me feel that my own life is running away through my fingers, one day so like the last that time speeds up and the weeks whirl past like scenes from a speeding car.  But I don't want a "bucket list" - thirty places to see before you die, fifty restaurants to eat in, ten great novels to read.  That really is not how I work.  When I see friends with more freedom to travel than we have at the moment I don't feel any overwhelming envy of them.  There is the odd pang.  I long to go back to see New Zealand.  I would like to visit friends in British Columbia.  Both of those may happen sometime.  But mostly I am very aware of how fortunate I am to live with people I love in a place that I love and to have the luxury of choosing when and where I work doing something I enjoy.  I love my family and see them often, considering that none of them live nearby.  I love my friends, and see them not often enough.  I love my garden but it would take all the time I could give it and still need more.  I love learning my Welsh but don't do enough of it.  Is there room in my overcrowded life for more of anything or do I need less of something?

What would I regret if I did not do it might be the question I suppose.  It helped me to come to the decision to leave my previous job a couple of years ago.  It wasn't that I didn't like my job, in many ways I loved it, but I knew that if I had only five or ten years left I did not want to have spent them doing more of the same.  I wanted to spend them with the people I love, doing things that I love.  I wanted to have time to make a garden, to make cakes with small children, to sit in a cafe and watch the world go by or drink a glass of wine in the sun with a friend.  Ah that is it.  Writing it down makes me see.  I need to do more idling, both here and away from home I need to do a little less doing and a little more just being.  That is what I need to do with some of my time.  Be.

End of month view for December and what is in flower on 2nd January

For most of 2010 and 2011 I took part in the end of month view in the garden, hosted by Helen at Patientgardener  It has been fascinating to have a record of the passing months although I must admit I slipped a bit at the end of last year.  My garden sadly does not have fabulous bones, even though it is in a fabulous place, and particularly when autumn and winter are windy and wet it all looks rather soggy and sad.  So I have decided to cheer myself up by posting pictures of what is in flower in the different areas as well and to my surprise a lot was in flower when I went out with my camera on the 2nd January 2012.

Here is the side garden.  How I wish for a crisp gravel path running up towards the gate and out into the field to the workshop.  At this time of year the grass is muddy and worn.  Truly uninspiring.

But there are things in flower if you take the time to look.

In the foreground of the picture, behind the sweet box, the first of the hellebores has started to flower and just beyond it a single solitary cyclamen shines in the sun.

Out in the field the new orchard is just bare trees and rough grass.  There is no sign yet of the little daffodils around the trees.

But in the bare and scruffy cutting garden, two sunflower heads still twist against the sky.

There is a rose in flower in the little garden behind the holiday cottage

and a wallflower coming into flower too.

In the corner of the field the hamamelis mollis came into flower quite suddenly.  One day I went to see if it was flowering as it is not on any of my daily paths and is easy to miss.  The greybrown twigs were thin and bare.  And then I caught a whiff of its scent on my way to the compost heaps and found the fizzing, spidery explosions dancing against the bare branches.

There is nothing happening on the sunny bank from a distance.  The little quince tree which has been shedding a branch or two a year for the last three years lost another big branch in the winds.  We might have to accept that it is turning up its toes.  The wood is brittle and thin.  We are thinking about biting the bullet and taking out what is left and planting a new crab apple a little further away from the bench.  I fancy a Malus John Downie but would love to know what you would recommend.

  On the bank the pink valerian is still throwing up the odd flower.  I know this is a thug but the bees and butterflies love it and it grows where other things won't.  I intend to be stricter with myself this year in moving the little seedlings to really inhospitable places rather than letting them have the room which could be given to my pinks and irises.

The kitchen garden isn't doing much either.  Down at the far end where the hens live there is so much mud it is like a battlefield.

But the pineapple sage is still blooming against the wall.  I have taken some of my salvias into the greenhouse but this one survived in the most sheltered spot in the garden through last winter's snow and severe frosts so I hope it will be fine this year.  This bed is due for a rethink this year.  The far end is grown through with snowberry but I am intending to dig it out and to give the bed over to more salvias, flowering herbs such as rosemary and annual poppies and marigolds.

And back in front of the house, the campanula is still in flower even though there are snowdrop snouts pushing up a few feet away.

Today Ian trimmed the new native hedges in the field for the first time.  I am not keen on January and February but at least we are half way through winter now.  Soon there will be snowdrops and crocuses and daffodils.  I must try not to wish my life away!

Resolution time again

I have been blogging nearly five years!  Astonishing.  One of the results of this is that,  as with any form of diary keeping, I have a record so I have been reading back through the resolutions I have made (or not made) in January 2008 and January 2010.  I don't seem to have made any at all in 2009 and certainly every now and then I just decide not to.   I did make some last year.  Here they are with some thoughts about how they went.  That might just be the decider as to whether to make 2012 a "resolving" or a "not resolving" year!

1. I will make more time with friends and, if going away from home is a bit tricky just now, more invitations for people to come here.   Mmm patchy results with this one.  I have managed to get away and to spend some time with friends.  For the very first time, a year has gone by in which I haven't seen one of my oldest friends although I am about to do something about that.  I think I could resolve this one all over again!
2. I will do something every day that is just for me: a bath, a glass of good wine, half an hour upstairs on the bed with a book. Tick!
3. I will do something every day that is just for Ian.  This is harder than it sounds.  He is a great one for sorting everything out for himself and looking after other people all the time.  Yes, well I said this was one would be hard and it is.  Even when you try to do things for him he tends not to want you to.   Maybe every day was a bit ambitious, perhaps once a month might just work!
4. I will take the time every day to listen to my FIL, just to sit and chat for half an hour without trying to fill the time with jobs and chores.  I am getting my ear in now, beginning to understand both the strong regional accent and his own idiolect which means that he can expect you to fill in missing words and translate phrases.  Soon I may even always understand the meaning of "the old one, two", a phrase which slides around with, as far as I can tell, an entirely variable meaning, often tripping me up and leaving me grasping at empty air.  I will slow down and, for some time every day, let him set the pace.  Patchy again, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.  Oddly I suspect that if I did a bit more of number one, I could manage a bit more of this one!   And this year is ending with the need to spend more time with my own mother and father as my father's health worsens and they live three hundred miles away.  Tricky.
5. I will buy and wear some clothes in gorgeous colours.  I fancy a singing blue and green like the peacock feathers in the vase behind me.  Did some of this but not nearly enough!
6. I will go to yoga every week and become a truly bendy person.  Went quite a bit, didn't stiffen up entirely, true bendiness remains an aspiration.
7. I think I might join a choir.  I think we might say that this one is not going to happen, not enough time, not high enough up the list.
8. I think I might get a dog, maybe not right this minute though.  Ah now this is a biggy and still hanging around a year on.  I need to decide once and for all how much I want one.  Ian is not keen.  I pine.  I'm not a piner and don't like myself for doing it.  I need to make my mind up one way or the other.
9. I will plant yet more flowers for butterflies and bees in the field around the fruit trees.  Tick! Tick! Tick!  Yes I did this one and can do even more.  Yay!
10. I will ensure that I see all the blogging friends I have been lucky enough to meet so far and also add some new ones to the "met in real life" tag.  And I did this one too, both keeping up with the ones I had met and meeting VP and Patientgardener here and Beangenie at Karen's.  Tick! Tick!
11. I will paint my toenails, even though it is winter.  Mmmm, they were painted but they aren't now...

Well that wasn't too bad.  It is clearly not an entire waste of time to make New Year Resolutions now that I have stopped resolving to get fitter and to lose weight and to master successional sowing.  

2011 has not been an easy year in many ways so I think the big resolution for 2012 will be to
HAVE MORE FUN, by myself with books and gardening and some pampering (I feel a pedicure coming on), with Ian by walking and taking time out together, even having the odd holiday maybe, with my friends by arranging to meet up with both old and new (I feel a weekend with my oldest friend and a trip to London are both on the cards), with my family by ensuring that we all get together whenever we can both up and down and across the generations.

I am a classic Virgo type, big on duty and hard work.
This year I resolve to find as many occasions as possible for HAVING A BALL!!