Category: Gardens

The changing face of the gardener’s toolshed

One of the pleasures of the garden is that it changes – every single day. Walk there daily, and you hardly notice as one plant quietly ends its moment in the sun, while another comes into vigorous life.

Visiting a garden less often, you notice those changes. Back in June at Harlow Carr, we walked among banks and beds crowded like this…..

A month later, they were gone. Instead, we meandered among beds thronged with these……

But I escaped the sights of the garden for a few moments in the Victorian potting shed. Looks at how these tools have changed over the years! Once sparkling and sturdy, now they’re dulled by rust and years of use. And yet ….. if I set out to buy a set of garden tools today, I’d be choosing ones that look very much like these. You can’t beat a functional design that’s stood the test of time. My plant labels might not look half so elegant though, nor my pots so characterful.

 

My contribution to today’s Ragtag Challenge: change.

Click on any image to view full size.

Peace in the Garden

We’ve had Team London here this week: an engagingly exhausting three year old and his baby sister make great company, but we’ve had a tendency to disappear to our beds not long after they do, and be snoring sweetly by 10.00 o’clock at the latest.  However, in among exploring York, farmyard life, a canal, and the Wild Woods at the bottom of the garden, we had a day at Harlow Carr, the RHS gardens in Harrogate.

It provided William with plenty of Things to Do Before he’s 11 3/4:  roll down a hill; go barefoot; watch a bird and have fun with sticks for instance.  He and Zoë were very happy.

But for us, despite their bright enthusiasm for all there was to see and do, it was a green oasis, a haven of peace.  We were content, strolling along the quiet paths, or beside a stream, sharing our space with bees, butterfies and birds.

Click on any image to view full size.

My entry for today’s Ragtag Challenge: Peace

Pretty in Pink

Overlooking the lake at the Himalayan Gardens, Grewelthorpe.

I couldn’t be doing with pink when I was younger.  I thought it was an itsy-bitsy sort of colour, suitable to be worn by annoying little girls of the Violet Elizabeth Bott persuasion (You do know who I’m talking about here, don’t you?  Violet Elizabeth was the lisping, spoiled creature who tormented Richmal Crompton’s delightfully grubby-kneed and accident-prone Just William, as popular now as when he was first created in 1922).

I declined to dress my young daughters in pink, or to wear it myself.  I despised its sugar-sweet prettiness.

These days I’m rather less hardline.  I even have a raspberry pink shirt.

All the same, I think pink is happiest in the garden.  It’s here that flowers can celebrate the colour in all its variety, from the softest most delicate shades of baby pink through to vibrant, vivacious flamingo pink.  Pastel pink.  Shocking pink.  And pinks that use flower names: cherry blossom; rose; fuschia; carnation; cyclamen; dogwood.

Here’s a picture gallery of May time flowers taken over the last few years.  All of them are pink.  And I like every single one.

Many of these pictures were taken in our garden; in our village; at Newby Hall; and at the Himalayan Gardens at Grewelthorpe.  It’s my entry for today’s Ragtag Challenge: pink.

Click on any image to view full size.

 

 

Identical?

I’ve never been much good at twiddling with the controls on my camera.  I even joined a photography course recently, in an effort to get to grips with apertures, shutter speeds and ISO controls.  But it just made my head hurt, and I reverted to ‘Automatic’ as my default modus operandi.  I decided I’m a snaphot-ist, not a photographer.

d having an hour to spare, I turned to the ‘palette’ settings and took an identical shot using every single one. Though I forgot to take one on ‘Automatic’, so the tale isn’t quite complete. Can’t do it now. This little twig of blossom (cherry?), a chance discovery found in the road, wilted in the night.

Which do you like best?  As ever, click on any image to see it full size.  They’re in strict alphabetical order – no favouritism here.

Bleach bypass.
Cross process.
Dynamic monochrome.
Expressive.
Fantasy.
High dynamic.
High key.
Impressive art.
Low key.
Miniature effect.
Monochrome.
Old days.
One point colour.
Retro.
Rough monochrome.
Sepia.
Silky monochrome.
Soft focus.
Star filter.
Sunshine.
Toy effect.
Toy pop.

This is my entry in today’s Ragtag Challenge: identical

Now is the month of Maying …..

It’s been quite a treat to stare out of our kitchen window these last two days.  We have three lilac trees, one purple, one mauve and one white, which put on a spectacular and perfumed performance for one week only in May.  Two mornings ago, there was not a bud in sight.  By the evening, tight little green buds had appeared.  Yesterday they were bigger.  Today they’ve revealed their colours.  Tomorrow they’ll be out.  Then we go on holiday ….. and miss the rest.

Here’s what these hot few days in early May have produced in the garden.  A few early flowers: narcissi , primroses still survive – just.

Naked trees have suddenly unfurled tender young leaves. Blossom blossoms. Bluebells and dandelions and poinsettia have appeared.   The first wisteria flowers shyly peek from behind their delicate leaves.  Spring has sprung.

And here is some May time music:  Thomas Morley’s ‘Now is the month of maying’, sung by the Beaumont Singers.

Snapshot Saturday: the awakening garden

Originality has gone out of the window as I enter Day Twelve of the Great Coughing Virus.  I’ve found some pictures from last year’s much more clement spring.  This is a walk round and about the awakening garden, exactly a year ago.

This week’s WordPress photo challenge is ‘Awakening’.  Click on any image to view full size.

Snapshot Saturday: from Pyrenees to Pennines via books, a cup of coffee,a skein of geese …. and an elephant

The WordPress photo challenge this week is ‘Beloved’.

I don’t think the humans in my life whom I love would be happy for me to plaster their images all over the blogosphere.  I have no pets, beloved or otherwise.  So I’ll have to look a little further.

Here’s a little miscellany of images, beloved images:

  • The Yorkshire Dales, whose rolling hills, bisected by ancient drystone  walls I missed so much during our years in France.
  • The Pyrenees, from their richly flowered springtime meadows through to winter, when their rocky slopes are covered in deep snow, and which I now miss every single day.  I’ll miss the shared picnics on our walks together, when our French friends pooled resources, and we ate everybody’s offerings of home-cured sausage, local cheeses, bread, home-baked cakes together with wine and somebody’s grandfather’s very special eau de vie.
  • Springtime daffodils.  Every year I go into deep mourning when they wither, die and finally become untidy heaps of dying leaves.  I’m happier now as they thrust their sheathed stems through the hard soil, promising to flower soon- but not quite yet.
  • There are books: I need a pile beside my bed to get me through the night.
  • A single, perfect cup of coffee from Bean and Bud in Harrogate.
  • Skeins of geese flying overhead mark the seasons here, and I love their haunting, raucous cries.
  • And so on….
    The Pyrenees seen from St. Julien de Gras Capou in summertime.
    A shared picnic near Montaillou, in March.
    The Nidderdale Way.
    Near Pateley Bridge.
    We’ve already seen our first daffodils in North Stainley this year.
    Just a random pile of books. I don’t think I’ve read most of these.
    Our beloved Bean and Bud,
    Geese flying uncharacteristically untidily over Marfield Wetlands.

I’ll end though with this.  I wasn’t beloved of this elephant in Kumbakonam,  Tamil Nadu, who was only doing his job when I visited him ten years ago on my Indian Adventure.  But I felt beloved and very special when he raised his trunk and brought it down upon my shoulder – his very distinctive way of blessing me.

Elephant in the temple of Adi Kumbeswarar, Kumbakonam, ready to give me his blessing.

Click on any image to see a slideshow of the photos, full-size.

Snapshot Saturday: You can never have too many snowdrops

2018. Our earliest snowdrops.

On New Year’s Day, I excitedly posted a photo of the earliest snowdrops of the year, spotted that very morning.  If I’d known that this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge was to be ‘Growth’, I might just have held back.

As it is, I now realise just how special those early hardy little shoots are.  That little patch of snowdrops I showed you was alone, quite alone on a sea of bare earth, creeping ivy and a few shriveled Autumn leaves.

Let’s fast forward maybe four weeks.  This is what the garden and surrounding woodlands will look like after all the hundreds and thousands of local snowdrops have grown, pushing themselves forth through the chilly frozen earth.  Our annual miracle.

February 2017.  All the local snowdrops have arrived.

Click on any image to view full size.

Supplementary Snapshot Saturday: First snow

The weekly photo challenge posed by WordPress is taking a week off.  I don’t have to.  I thought I’d add to the piles of photos clogging up the internet showing snow.  Snow in the garden, out by the lake, up a mountain, shutting down the motorways, whitening city streets ….

We woke up this morning to bitter cold.  Minus One Celsius.  This will make my American and Canadian readers laugh.  Look at this post from my blogging friend Kerry.  Where she wakes up it’s  -32, and steam is rising from the frozen lake.  She’d better not read this.  Where she is, nobody ventures out, not even – especially not even – the cats.

This is snowy weather British style.  Just a couple of inches.  Just enough to snarl up the transport system and fill the airwaves with ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ type warnings.  It’ll probably be gone tomorrow.

 

 

Click on any image to view full size.

PS.  Happy New Year!