There are odds and ends of things flowering in the garden. Some are in their normal flowering season, most are aberrations, an odd very late or very early bloom, usually very tatty. I'd hoped for Alstroemeria 'Indian Summer' but it wasn't to be. There are buds still but they're not opening. Makes you wonder what…
Six on Saturday – 28/12/2019
Well here we are twixt Christmas and a new year, again. I should reflect on the year just gone. . . . . . . . ., there, that's done. Perhaps some resolutions for next year? Nah, don't like the sound of that, let's go with good intentions rather than resolutions. One. Move the tunnel.…
Seed sowing, a departure
I have been a member of the Alpine Garden Society for a very long time and every year they produce a most impressive seed list which for one reason or another, I've never had anything from. This year that changed, I dipped my toe into the 5621 items on the list, picked my allocation of…
Six on Saturday – 21/12/2019
The output from my solar panels gives me a check on how much we've seen of the sun this month and it's not a lot. It's still already higher than for the whole of December last year though. The total for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week wouldn't have brewed a cup of tea. In…
A walk on the wild(ish) side, part two
Picking up from where I left off last week finds me down from the summit of Brown Willy and about to take off across open moorland. I have been up here in fog and the lack of features makes it very disorienting. You want a heading of 35°. The first low hill has a couple…
Six on Saturday -14/12/2019
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…
A walk on the wild(ish) side.
This has nothing to do with gardening other than in the sense that nature is a source of inspiration to most gardeners, including me. Really wild country is pretty much non-existent in southern England. The land has been populated too long and cultivated too intensively for there to be anywhere wholly natural left. Bodmin Moor…
Six on Saturday – 7/12/2019
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…
Six on Saturday – 30/11/2019
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…
The garden in winter.
Keeping a garden interesting gets more difficult as autumn slips into winter. The climate here is not warm enough to have nearly as wide a choice of material for winter display as for summer, nor is it cold enough to force me to shut up shop altogether. I have a choice, I can give up…
garden ruminations 