I was up early to do some gardening; it's a beautiful day here. One has to be grateful, after all my grimacing at the relentless grey of Winter. I watered the new plants, stripped down and reassembled the line-strimmer, finished off tidying up the lawn edges, and did about an hour of pulling coarse grass and baby sycamores out of the gravel driveway.
Some excitement across the lane; the stables here are putting on their annual pony-cart driving festival, and some of the early arrivals were getting in a little practice in the Old Walled Garden opposite my house. This area is now just pasture for the stables, but long ago it was a market garden. The stone wall surrounding it dates back to about 1760.
First arrivals: horse-boxes, RVs, horse-boxes with built-in accommodation. This place will be jammed by Sunday - visitors and competitors come from all over, including That Europe
9am practice; considering the visitors must pay a lot of money to attend, the professional trainer in attendance is surprisingly blunt in his appraisal of their efforts! Different world
Anyone who has seen my wargames will recognise this as a woodland hex (which will offer protection from light artillery) with, in the foreground, an enclosure hex (which won't, electric fence or no)
Buddleia just coming out. The butterflies will love this, later in the year...
The Long Bed in our garden where the hedge blew down; more new plants - lots of Hebes, a Choisya, a Philadelphus, a Deutzia - all have to be watered daily in the dry weather
Our beloved white lilac is coming into blossom...
...there are even some leaves on my new beech hedge plants...
...though the original section of the beech hedge is about a week ahead, just to show the young'uns the way
Lovely photos of the Old Homestead, Tony! Our white lilac (and purple one too!) are coming into bloom as well.
ReplyDeleteHi Jon - I enjoyed my gardening this morning! [Fixing the strimmer was quite an achievement, since secretly I am afraid of it...]
DeleteThe White lilac is a beauty, but this year it should be special, since it has been pruned into shape, and a mass of ivy was removed. Every year, this tree brightens our lives until the first rainstorm, at which point it turns brown and the flowers are wrecked. Maybe this year it will be hardier?
I spent an ungrateful afternoon last autumn getting the ivy out of a hedge, but have been rewarded with copious (white) blossom this spring - I hope you get something similar with white lilac.
DeleteHawthorn? Blackthorn? A good job well done - most of the blossom hedges I know of are scratchy things, so that would have been heavy going.
DeleteWe have big problems with ivy here - the wood at the back of my house is full of it, and it doesn't give up easily. I have in my possession a book of rather strange poetry by a rather strange friend, and one of his poems is about something going seriously wrong with the world, so that the last things left alive are ivy and cockroaches. Not an easy image to get out of your head...
Hedge may have been overcalling it: a line of something akin to Orange Blossoms, not scratchy, yet poking - in an upper cut sort of a way - of anyone stooping after ivy.
DeleteSounds very fine - maybe a Choisya or similar? - well done. I must say I've taken a lot of pleasure in, and solace from, the garden work this Spring - it's a great comfort when the Supposedly Real World is obviously crazy.
DeleteBy the way, my dilettante(?) status as a gardener is revealed in photo #6 above; the buddleia, as I say, will be much appreciated by the butterflies later in the year, but that is largely because buddleia doesn't flower until later in the year. The tree in my photo is a lilac - the only reason I thought it was a buddleia is that I was told this by the chap I bought the house from, 25 years ago. Doh. He must have been as daft as me.
Smashing. Lifts the spirits no end.
ReplyDeleteYes indeed. The sort of day that makes one glad to be half alive.
DeleteFollowing some unknown urge at about 10 this morning I decided to tackle the "problem corner" in our garden. Now I ache everywhere and have nettle stings. Oh and a large pile of stumps and weeds. What else would you do on the warmest weekend of the year?
ReplyDeleteStill a long way off your own garden I am afraid!
Well done, young sir. It is all your own pile of stumps and weeds - be proud of it.
DeleteQuite apart from the pleasure I take from looking at the improvements we have carried out in our own garden thus far this year, I find some additional comfort in two facts which still surprise me:
(1) However miserable the physical labour, or the aching knees and lumbar region, it is better than worrying about not having done it.
(2) Though it has been something of a hefty expense to play serious catch-up after letting the garden slide for 3+ years, it is less than it would have been if we had just employed a gardener through the 3+ years we didn't have one. Maybe letting things slide is a better strategy than I thought. I'll try tariffs next.
Lovely to see everything blossoming.
ReplyDeleteInteresting to see the pony-cart thing. I wonder if any of my forebears used to go up there for it. I discovered a video on YouTube of my mother's maternal grandparents in a pony & cart on the beach at Cleethropes. Old Martha Nuttall, née Cox, was from a Roma family settled in East Yorks. Not sure about great grandad Monty though.
Very serious business here - the daughter of the lady who owns the stables competes at World Championship level, and is a coach for the Scottish Carriage Driving Association. Members of the family have been competing for at least 3 generations, I understand. Good to watch, but scary too.
DeleteWhile I thoroughly enjoy making miniature terrain…
ReplyDeleteThe real thing is something I don’t enjoy… I enjoy the end result though and sitting in a nice garden…like yours… sipping a glass of wine is a wonderful thing .
I have employed a gardener to come round next week and deal with “The Wilderness “
A flamethrower and flail should handle things nicely…🤣
All the best. Aly
I have been heartened over the last few months to find that the effort of trying to get the garden smartened up after a few years of decline is rewarding anyway, but is also less awful than fretting about not having done anything about it.
DeleteIt also works out far cheaper, and better, than if we'd just continued paying out on a regular basis for our previous gardener (who was crap, and possibly the only outspoken racist Daily Mail reader in Dunbar).
The garden is looking fabulous Tony, particularly the new additions. Gosh, that blue sky. I didn't think that you got any of it there 😀
ReplyDeleteBest wishes, James
Thanks James - yes, it's lovely here when the sun shines. Sometimes we forget...
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