Off camera

The Gardener's Cottage made a comment that my garden was,"to die for", and I felt obliged to email and explain that my blog presented a very partial view! I simply edit out, keeping off camera the scruffy, work-a-day areas,

the neglected corners and ugly waterbutts,

the Christmas tree in its pot, languishing outside until next Christmas Eve,

the bonfire mound

and compost heap

      and the little shed that houses the mower.

I write about my pleasure in growing white flowers, but some days the dominant whites are the ones that hang from my washing line.

 

So, Janet, this post is for you - the parts of my garden that are not, "to die for"!

Plenty

This is the month when we gorge on home grown produce. The seeds that I exchanged at the swap shop have been a great success. Now that the broad beans and peas have finished cropping we are picking and eating courgettes, cucumbers, carrots, beetroot and tomatoes as well as my favourite climbing French bean, 'Blue Lake'.

It's a prolific year and I'm making ratatouille to store for the winter. I have rather unappetisingly labeled it, 'RAT' on the freezer cartons!

Ratatouille.

Heat 100 mls olive oil in a heavy based pan and add sliced onions and crushed garlic. Cook to soften.

Add sliced courgettes, peppers and tomatoes and simmer for 40 minutes.

Cool and freeze.

Roasted peppers with tomatoes and anchovies.

4 peppers halved through the stalks and deseeded.

Place a tomato half in each pepper cavity and add garlic slivers, top with anchovy fillets.

Drizzle with olive oil, add herbs and black pepper.

Bake about 30 minutes until the peppers are soft and slightly charred.

 

Meanwhile, other things are ripening.

Haircuts

I've been going round the garden giving plants a good haircut; the lack of rain has shortened their flowering season and things are looking rather tired. I'm always loathe to cut the lavender but know that if I don't the bushes will become too leggy and lose their shape.

The lavender has been alive with bees throughout the summer, the flower heads swaying in the slightest breeze, a mediterranean plant enjoying a mediterranean summer for a change. Plants edge the path to the front door and crowd over steps around the garden, releasing their perfume as you brush past.

The santonila, bay and box are all neatly trimmed, but I haven't had the heart to cut back the lavender just yet.

Today we have, at last, had a much-needed downfall of rain. I went to the hairdresser's for a short back and side - my hairstyle is asymmetric.  When I got home the uncut lavender looked really bedraggled. 

Good Companions

Although I've stated my dislike of orange and yellow flowers I always plant masses of marigolds - but only in the vegetable garden.

I collect seed each autumn and sow a border in spring around the carrot crop. The strong scent of the marigolds is supposed to keep away the low flying, pesky carrot fly. It seems to work.

Random flowers also pop up in the vegetable beds among brassica and greens, where,in contrary fashion, I am happy to see them.

The fennel also seeds itself freely about the place, here its delicate tracery making a pleasing structural contrast to the spheres of the globe thistle.

There are any number of good companions in the garden, some planned and others just happen-chance,

 close colour combinations, pink underplanting pink

soft harmonies of lavender and mauve,

or startling pairings, where a scarlet poppy arrives amongst the purple petunias.

In the wood

Today started with a downpour, so we put on our waterproofs and cleared the wood store ready for a new delivery of hardwood to use in the winter. At our last home we  felled our own trees from an overgrown copse of ash, proving the truth of the saying that wood can warm you three times, felling, splitting and finally burning.

When that became too much like hard work we went to forestry auctions and bid for cords of timber.

Now we just phone up and ready cut wood is delivered to our door.

 Talk about the seven ages of man! I hope that I'm not going to end up as a little old lady huddled around an electric fire!

I walk in the woods with my dog most days, where the network of small paths always reminds me of Robert Frost's poem, 'The Road Not Taken'. I was taught to recite it at school and assumed that the woods that he described were in his homeland of America. I love his poetry. Imagine my pleasure on learning, only recently, that he wrote this poem in England, after walking in woods near London with his friend, Edward Thomas.

This was the first piece of work that taught me to look beneath the surface of words, to find other meanings. 

My husband works in wood and his studio is an old stone outbuilding that was formerly the gamekeeper's store. He has altered it very little for his own use, adding only a cast iron stove for winter warmth and replacing mesh with glass in the small window spaces that provided ventilation for the hanging game. The roof beams are studded with nails - it must have been quite a sight when the store was full.

(Our wood store is the remains of one of the gamekeeper's dog pens.)

  Summer Rain

In summer rain towards the woods we walk,

in wellingtons and waterproofs quite well prepared.

But through the field tall grasses soak our knees

and my small dog is drowned in buttercups,

she follows, sodden, at my heels.

Within the wood, a canopy of leaf

creates an underwater world of green

where raindrops are no longer felt or seen

but patter out their music overhead.

So,

luminously lit, we walk,

another season come, another shift

of colour, and our senses made alert.

Our daily walk transformed

 again,

again.

'Robin Hood', relief woodcarving.

Lolling about.

Does it sound like hard work, all this activity in the garden, the digging, weeding, clearing, hacking back and harvesting? Well, it is also a great place for just lolling about and doing nothing.

There are seats positioned in various places around the garden to take advantage of sun or shade at different times of the day,

 a scruffy old seat in a neglected corner 

and  deckchairs to move about at will.

We like to eat outside whenever the weather is kind - this summer almost daily, last summer hardly at all!

The greenhouse is a good place to sit and drink a cup of coffee or try to stay awake while stretched out on the steamer chair.

An old boat from the nearby lake is up-ended and fixed on the ground, but it rocks gently when you are in it and is a good, dry place to be when it's raining.

The arbour and the boat seat are both enclosed, private places. Pipistrelles flit about the boat seat at dusk and from the arbour you can watch the moon come up and hear owls hooting in the woods.

We had a hammock, slung from the branch of a huge blue cedar at our previous house, but unfortunately there is no place for it here. It was a favourite with our daughters, somewhere to loll and dream, just as I had done in my own childhood.

Travels with my Boxer Dog.

In childhood I traveled in a hammock

with the dog and my tartan blanket

which kept our limbs from catching in the strings.

We sailed to countries that no one had heard of

 and that now I have forgotten.

The dog looked fierce,

some thought him ugly.

I warmed my toes in his mouth

and told him secrets.

We traveled south, mostly,

for we both loved sunshine.

Only a cat crossing the garden

would disturb our journeys.

Then he'd abandon ship

to lead his own adventures,

leaving me swinging erratically,

traveling alone,

bailing out water,

far from home.