Family meet-up

We went to Bournemouth at the weekend for a long overdue meet-up with family. How glorious! Last year when our daughter was home-working and her partner furloughed he set to work on their steeply sloping back garden. Confined to quarters as I was by the Covid rules I could only watch the progress via Facetime or photos so I was really looking forward to seeing the finished result.

This was the state of play last year!

Retaining walls and steps being constructed to create three different levels.

And this is how it was looking in the early morning at the weekend.

 

 The weather was perfect. We spent all day outside.

 The rhododendrons are in full bloom all over the town but only one bush remains from the many that had been crowding out Wee One's garden.

 

A  few of the rhododendron flowers brought into the house together with a vase of roses from my garden.

June is the month when my garden is full of roses, many of them grown from cuttings that came from our former home. Others are cuttings from friends or bought because I couldn't resist them or their lovely names, such as Honorine de Brabant (even though she is rather spindly in my garden!) Here are  some of the roses that I grow.

Gertrude Jekyll.

The Queen of Denmark.

Rosa Mundi.

Heritage.

Climbing Iceberg.

Paul's Himalayan Musk  on the veg garden fence. It is such a strong rose and gives one great burst of flower each year before I cut it hard back. (Hard to imagine that such a vigorous rose came as a small cutting from my previous home.)

I fill the house with cut flowers so that we can enjoy the perfume. I don't know the name of this rose. It came as a sliver of stalk from Corfu many years ago. Perhaps someone can recognise it?

The petals soon fall, but they are wonderful while they last.

Are you a lark or an owl?

For much of the year I can confidently say that I'm an owl, slow to come to my senses in the morning and wide awake at night. But for a few weeks in the summer I'm up and raring to go as the sun comes up, wandering round the garden in shoes wet with the dew or, as yesterday morning, in mac and wellingtons because there was a fine drizzle of rain. June, the most delightful month. By lunchtime the rain had stopped. Friends came in the afternoon and we sat in the sunshine for afternoon tea and caught up on our news. (News! What news? We have been nowhere and done nothing for months!)

While strawberries are the favourite fruit of Pascale, whose blog is Le Jardin de Pacalou, mine are cherries. There are plenty in the shops just now. I make a chocolate and cherry cake filled with cherry jam and a sprinkling of frozen stoned cherries. (Fresh cherries I just greedily save for myself!)

A generous layer of cream on top of the fruit and it is good to go.

I praised the free-range eggs of Jack, the local farmer, in a recent post. At the weekend when I went to collect some more I learnt that a fox had come in broad daylight and killed thirty of his hens. The foxes are very active at this time of year, presumably with young to feed. But really, although they are lovely looking creatures, they are vicious and just love a killing spree. I would keep ducks again if I thought for one moment that I could keep them safely in the garden. We had Khaki Campbell ducks when our children were small, sweet natured pets and prolific egg layers, all killed by a fox on the one night that I forgot to shut their hut. There were tears all round!

Wee One and the ducks were good models for my illustration work!

Morning walk  with the camera around the garden.

It is great growing weather. The spuds are looking promising in the veg garden - now that's a sight to gladden a Murphy's heart!

Bank Holiday

Joy of joys, a Bank Holiday, sunshine and a clear blue sky! Suddenly everything in the garden has sprung into action. Clematis reaching up into the blue.

Iris are everywhere, but all the same colour. What happened to all the other colours that I used to grow?

We are cutting paths through the grass as we did last year and I'm trying to establish wild flowers in the uncut  areas.

I ordered a selection of plant supports online and they came at the weekend so I've been staking the delphiniums and hollyhocks. Can you spot them? Semicircular hoops in different heights and width

The flower borders are full of promise - and ground elder!

It has been a sociable weekend with friends and neighbours popping into the garden for tea and a chat. Cake and fizz with friends who were celebrating their wedding anniversary. It is wonderful to have weather like this so that we can meet up.

A posy from Sarah.

Raised beds -raised hopes!

 Last year, despairing of my overgrown strawberry patch and my rickety knees, we invested in some raised beds. It was cheaper to purchase ready-made kits than to source the wood ourselves. By the time we had added a liner and a delivery of topsoil the cost had mounted quite a bit. "How much do strawberries cost in the supermarket?" Himself wanted to know. How cross it made me - not the right attitude at all! When he can pick our own fruit without having to bend and scrabble about at ground level I'm hoping he will be more appreciative. I've been outside in the teeth of a gale and see that the strawberry plants are flowering. All we need now is some decent weather so that the fruit will set. We need plenty of sunshine for it to sweeten and ripen.

Meanwhile I'm skulking in the warmth of the kitchen. I'm dreaming of sunnier days and have made a fatless sponge filled with whipped cream and sliced strawberries. The fruit and cream were bought in Aldi but the eggs are from the farm down the road and the egg yolks make the cake a wonderful golden colour. The eggs are better than any that I can buy from a supermarket.

Come on weather, buck up!

Not going out!

 

May in Blighty - what a joke!

Sunday morning in the woods.

 We've had a good amount of rain, much needed after the dry month of April, and the landscape is transformed by fresh, green growth. 

The Saturday newspaper listed the twenty best bluebell woods to visit throughout the country. Happily the woods at either side of our village had not been included! Lockdown has seen a change in the pattern of people passing through our small community; cyclists bombing down the road as though it were a one-way street, walkers who sit on the village seat to eat their snacks and then leave their rubbish behind and cars randomly parked while dog walkers from who knows where exercise their pets.

                                                                                              

Sunday morning and the sun is shining, time to take a walk in the woods. It is damp by the lakeside and there is no sign of ducklings.

We have the woods to ourselves.

Strong winds have brought down quite a lot of dead wood.

It is wonderful to be in a bluebell wood on a day like this.

Back at home I take a wander round the garden.

The frost hasn't killed my tree peonies but it has certainly put payed to a good display of flowers for this year.

I'm grateful for the buds that have survived.

The allium leaves are dying back as their flower heads fatten.

Everything promises at this time of year!

And the tulips are still flowering.