ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
I've done a fair few of these six on Saturday posts and it occurred to me to wonder whether I'd missed anything, so I took a stroll round the garden and noted a few things I thought I might never have included, then came back in and checked. I could do at least three weeks…
Benign day today, gales tomorrow. We had a couple of frosts during the week so there's a lot of mush about but we're now back to the more usual succession of weather systems coming in off the Atlantic. It's not so much that nothing is happening outdoors, just that it's the same few things going…
I just listened to Sandy Denny's 'Late November'; first time in years. Getting nostalgic. How can she have been gone over 40 years? It's cold and wet and drear and dreich and I've got a cold. Must be winter. I haven't been out much lately, it never seems to stop raining and there's not a…
Just after I'd posted last Saturday's six, I loaded up the car with crocheted cacti and assorted other crafteries and took Sue down to Lanreath Church where she was partaking in a craft fair. With about four hours at my disposal before I had to collect her, I went across to Lockengate to visit one…
Commercial horticulture relies heavily on covered space. Uncertainty is the enemy and the weather is one big part of that which can to a degree be controlled by growing crops under glass or polythene. The nursery where I worked for 30 years had several polytunnels and three glasshouses. The biggest polytunnel was 63 feet wide…
If the forecast yesterday was right, last night was probably the coldest night of the autumn so far, though I have no thermometer outside so I don't know how cold it went before it started going up again. It was raining by six o'clock. The Dahlias and Impatiens in the garden will tell me. Yesterday…
It's absolutely sluicing it down just now, as it has been for several hours. The wind has dropped a bit though. Good thing I did my pictures yesterday when it was only drizzling. One. Camellia yunnanensis. I went down to Trelissick on Thursday to a meeting about a study day on Camellias that I'm going…
It's not great for taking pictures in the garden so I brought a few things in and tried to get good pictures of them. Took a couple in the rain too. One. I'll start and finish outdoors, pretty much the order the pictures were taken. This is Camellia sasanqua 'Navajo', which just about had its…
As the seasonal sine wave heads downwards I find myself taking pleasure out of ever smaller things in the garden. It doesn't seem forced, just natural. A smattering of flowers on the Daphne, a few late patches of blue from the Corydalis, the first bud opening on a camellia. The few things that are still…
Photo editing programs allow you to manipulate colours within photos, toning down everything except red perhaps. That's exactly what todays weather is doing, everything is dull except for the reds, which seem stronger than ever. Every component of my water harvesting system is getting a thorough testing and while I've made a few small alterations…
garden ruminations 