welsh hills again

A couple of years ago I wrote a number of posts on the year of being sixty two about the experience of getting older.  I was interested in the sense that our generation, in our sixties, is rather different from the women who have gone before us.  I don't remember my grandmother changing much from when I first remember her, when I think she was perhaps forty nine or fifty, to when she died at the age of seventy.  At fifty she was already a solid little barrel shape, encased in her corset which made her feel like a little hard barrel when she hugged me, which was often.  Her hair was already set in a tightly curled perm although I think at fifty she still had some of the red shade, which she handed onto my mother, which gently faded to white. My mother by contrast was immensely youthful looking so that the pictures of her at her sixtieth birthday show someone looking about fifteen years younger.  She always said that she would age very suddenly when she got to s...

Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post.  I am feeling so much better now!  The consensus from the medical types in the family is that it was a viral infection (and how often have we heard that about the otherwise unexplained!?).  Whatever it was it has gone and I am back to normal and very thankful for it. Nerines.  Can you ever have enough? It is a good thing to be back on form because last week was a rush around week.  It began with a trip down to Devon for the christening of younger son's two younger children.  Addy who is three and nine month old Daniel both behaved impeccably while having water on their foreheads and being handled by someone they do not know.  Actually that is probably not quite true for the three year old.  Chris and his wife are churchgoers so I imagine that Addy knew the minister who was christening her. There were a few minutes before the ceremony when she decided she might like to take her shoes off b...

A strange week which has left me feeling out of sorts and out of shape.  Monday started with yoga in the morning and it was a great class which left me feeling invigorated and energised.  In the afternoon I set out to do some cooking as we had guests coming on Tuesday.  Late afternoon I suddenly began to feel very unwell, nauseous, dizzy and dreadful.  I sat down in the sitting room and stayed there for about an hour and a half.  Eventually I began to feel a bit more normal and I went to bed a bit early. The next day I felt quite wiped out in the morning and Ian launched into cooking for our guests with me sitting around offering instructions.  By lunchtime I felt rather better and on Wednesday I felt ok.  Thursday morning I woke feeling bad again, tired and a bit sick.  In all this time we used Ian's oxymeter and my blood pressure machine to see if there were any indications of what was happening.  It looked as if my oxygen uptake was a bi...

What a long time since I have written here.  I find I am missing the way the blog records the days which otherwise whizz away so quickly so here, with no attempt to be for anyone other than myself, is blog as diary. Monday is yoga morning.  I have bought some new yoga clothes, well I bought them a few months ago.  For years I have used baggy track suit bottoms and old t-shirts as my yoga clothes.  I suddenly thought that doing yoga most weeks for nine years was probably an indication that I wasn't going to stop so two new pairs of leggings and two new t-shirts were allowed.  They are from Asquith and I like them very much.  In fact if the leggings were not so close fitting and I were not over sixty I would wear them all the time.  They are ludicrously comfortable, like your favourite pair of pyjamas when you were a child. This Tuesday was a meeting of the Clwydian Range Tourism Group, a group of people who run small tourism related businesses in ou...

If you are the same age as I am you might remember Ian Dury's song, "Reasons to be cheerful, part 2".  Well here are ten of mine, in no particular order: grandchildren tea wine eggs sunshine books knitting and crochet Ian swallows singing

Well while we wait for things to happen on the house front I have decided to turn my mind to learning and doing.  I love that sense of stretching myself and gaining competence and I feel as if I have been floating along in my comfort zone for a while.  There have been so many things going on: lots of new babies (ten grandchildren now!  can you believe it?) and the buying of the plot and putting the house on the market.  Now the last of the new grandchildren is here safely, just ten days ago, and there is nothing to do with the house other than play the waiting game.  The garden is pretty cared for at the moment thanks to the 100 day project and we have an August full of visitors coming up.  So here is a week or so of lull when I think I am going to shake myself up a bit. I used to be a great list maker when I was working and have dropped the habit for most of the time.  Life is full of cooking and eating and going to yoga and choir and spending time ...

Well it is day 100 plus 3 of the 100 day project.  So how did it go and was it worthwhile?  Did I enjoy it?  What did it do to how I feel about the garden and what did it do to the garden itself?  Time for some thinking. I decided not to do too much wondering about the project while I was in the middle of it as the whole point seemed to be the gently repeated doing so I just let the time pass and committed myself to doing something connected with the garden every day.  When we were here that tended to be something practical and outside, anything from an afternoon of serious hard work to the pulling up of a solitary creeping buttercup. When we were away with children and grandchildren or visiting friends I tried to keep my gardening mind engaged.  Sometimes that was reading although I notice I did not return to my vast numbers of gardening books.  Reading was something I did on the internet or in a magazine.  I am quite surprised I did no...

Not long until the end of the project now and suddenly it is time to pick things as well as to continue with the weeding and sorting.  It makes me realise just how long I have been doing this.  I started on 1st April 2018 at a time when things were only just beginning to grow after a long cold spring.  Now we are certainly in high summer and for May and June we have had a lot of hot dry weather.  When I look across to the hills on the other side of the valley the fields are brown and gold.  This is Wales.  The normal colour of my view is green, many shades of deep verdant green. But this evening through my window shows a bleached dry world.  It is still beautiful but it doesn't quite look like home.  It has been wonderful though to eat outside every day, to sit in the shade because the sun is too hot and to come into the old house where the slate floors and the thick walls produce a cool retreat.  The garden really does need some rain....

I am keeping the project up but with a lot of time spent with older daughter and family and younger daughter and hers  I need to catch up with documenting it! It is an amazing day here in North Wales.  This was the view when I opened the kitchen door this morning and it has stayed pretty much like this all day.  The forecast for the rest of this week is similar so this is a time to appreciate how beautiful it is and to sit on the sense that everywhere needs watering!  Of course it does, we can't have everything! Today's task was just a little one: to cut down the sweet cicely before it seeds all over the place.  Sweet cicely is a  very beautiful thing and while it is flower I love it for the foam of white and the scent.  The plant has a sweet, faintly aniseedy flavour to my palate, and can be used in cooking instead of sugar for things like pies and tarts.  But when it finishes flowering and goes to seed it will seed itself abso...

I have not been recording what I have been doing so here is my attempt at a catch up: Monday: pulled bindweed from the front bed, time taken about twenty minutes Tuesday: did some Spanish in the morning, had a meeting in the afternoon, deadheaded some roses before tea!  time taken about ten minutes Wednesday: today I went a bit bananas about exercise, doing my dance class in the morning, deciding to join in with the walking group in the afternoon and going to yoga in the evening.  I did no gardening whatsoever but I felt great! Thursday was another committed elsewhere day as was Friday.  On Thursday I did pilates in the morning, took the campervan for its service in the afternoon and spent about half an hour in between weeding one of the herb beds which always gets invaded by creeping bindweedn On Friday I went to Welsh in the morning and we went over to see daughter and her family in the afternoon before heading over to some friends for a barbecue.  In ...

I have been better at doing the gardening part of the project than I have at recording it on the blog!  This weekend has been full of family as younger son and his family came up from Devon and two of the others came across to say hello.The sun shone and the children got on amazingly well especially when you consider that they don't see each other that often!  And the value of the garden as a place to be was clear: to sit and chat and play and kick a football or throw a rugby ball or be endlessly pushed on a swing, to feed hens and make dens, to be taken for a walk by granddaughter number one, aged four and a half.  "I'm going to show you that there is even more garden down here, Grandma.  Follow me.  It goes on for ever."  (It really doesn't unless you are four.) So I am feeling more in love with the garden than I have for a long time.  Here is the side garden bubbling over with blue geranium. And the kitchen garden beautifully disguising it...

Can you believe it?  Day 65 and still going!  The last three days have meant quite a bit of garden time, much of it with Ian working as well.  It has been practical, functional gardening: clearing a raised bed, planting out beans and courgettes as well as planting out the cosmos seedlings and doing yet more of the endless weeding. I am not a vegetable gardener.  I like eating it but I don't like growing it.  It is labour intensive and doesn't have any of the imagination and satisfaction I get from mixing plants together and trying to create something which moves me, and ideally other people too.  I can sort of see that there can be a romance in vegetable gardening.  I love a good allotment and I do very much like the sense of eating something where I know exactly where and how it was grown.  But a few years ago we agreed that Ian would do veg and I would do flowers and that has suited me fine.  But Ian has been very busy over the last few w...

This is nearly two thirds of the way through!  That is amazing! Today younger daughter and her two children were here for the morning and for lunch.  As usual in the summer we spent a lot of time outside, feeding chickens, collecting eggs, swinging, throwing balls for the dog, hiding balls for the dog, going up to the farm to see the calves and then pretending I was the dog as Grace made me sit and wait and hid the ball for me to find.  All, as you can see, good fun but not what you might call relaxing.  It is lovely to be able to do it, for myself to build the relationship with the children and for our daughter to ease, just a tiny little bit, the relentless pressure of mothering two small children.  She handles this pressure with enormous patience, good humour and grace but it is still a hard job.  In fact both our daughters and both our daughters in law seem to mother small children far more easily and cheerily than I ever did.  I wonder if I woul...

Yesterday was a day full of movement: dance class in the morning (and yay!  I have finally cracked hulahooping), a walk and some gardening in the afternoon and yoga class in the evening.  I don't want you to think this is my normal programme.  Usually if I aim to do even one of those things I feel I am doing ok and don't attempt to fit in anything else.  But yesterday for some reason I just like felt like moving and I am glad I did. Today is a more sedentary day, even though I keep reminding myself that sitting is the new sugar.  I started the day with a visit to the dentist and the hygeinist.  I might as well be honest about this.  I don't mind the dentist because he generally doesn't find anything to do but I really don't like going to the hygeinist.  This is not the fault of the hygeinists themselves who are all lovely.  I am a wimp.  I don't like the scraping and the pushing my mouth about and the sense that there are more things i...

Every day I have done a small thing in the garden, unless I have been away in which case I have tried to give it some thought.  The greatest difference it is making at the moment is to the way I notice it.  A peony opening, a bit of bindweed twining through the salvias, a tiny bluetit chirping in the hedge: there is something about the daily engagement which makes me see it all. Today I have put geraniums in the pots by the holiday cottage door and begun to seriously harden off the cosmos seedlings which I bought from Sarah Raven. I whisked through the side garden removing tiny heads of nettles which were poking up between the hardy geraniums.  Then I sat for a few minutes, listening to the garden, birds and pollinators and the distant hum of my neighbour's tractor. From my seat the alliums and the orange geum clash gloriously. Looking back towards the house, more alliums are clashing with the smyrnium and the side garden is only days away from erupting int...

Still here, still doing the project!  Life has got a bit busy so that it has been a bit of a stretch both doing the project and recording it have  so here is a bit of a catch up. On Wednesday I went to Chelsea Flower Show which I decided to regard as part of the project, since thinking about the garden is a necessary part of gardening it.  Chelsea is an interesting conundrum.  The beauty and perfection of the show gardens is another world and the transient nature of what they produce is very different from what we try to do as gardeners with a garden which we live in and with the whole year round.  And yet it produces moments of delight and beauty as you clamber through the crowds. This is from one of artisan gardens which I like a lot for their small scale and accessibility.  I was struck this year by how often I was attracted by the hard landscaping as much as the planting.  Perhaps I am turning into Ian. I love this slate sphere and woul...

Yes! Past the half way mark!  There have been tiny bits in the garden since I last posted, mostly watering and the kind of weeding where you wander past and pull one thing up.  And no working in the garden today because today I am off to some meetings this morning and then down to London in late afternoon to go to the Chelsea Flower Show tomorrow, thanks to an invitation from a friend. I am leaving the garden alive with all sorts of bees and blossom.  When you walk around there are places where the noise of insects beats joyously around your head. I am really looking forward to Chelsea.  I went two or three years ago with the same friend and we had a great day.  The trick for me to Chelsea is not trying to relate what you see to your own space all the time, instinctive although that is.  That is much easier to do when you live somewhere like I do where the garden is high and wildish and grows what it wants to grow rather than some vision of an Englis...

Just a short time in the garden this morning before heading off for the weekend. This is a part of the garden I haven't shown you much although in many ways it is my favourite part (when other parts aren't).  We planted a bed of native trees parallel to the hedge at the bottom of the field.  Besides bird cherry, rowan, birch and whitebeam there are dogwoods, a daphne and a magnolia which doesn't really belong there but had to go somewhere.  It seems to blend in ok, just drawing attention to itself for the short glorious burst of flowering before fading back into the background. The trees are underplanted with hellebores, hardy geraniums and pulmonaria.  In spring there are lots of snowdrops and primroses.  Theoretically this bed looks after itself but actually grass invades occasionally and of course the ubiquitous creeping buttercup.  But it is probably the best place in the garden for looking after itself.  I spent a bit of time this morning t...