welsh hills again

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:36:00 +0000

Over at Patiopatch Laura is recording a year in the life of a wych elm. Recording requires close looking and I thought I would join in if only to ensure that I really looked at my trees. Trees are crucial but it is easy to regard them as a pleasant backdrop to the real business of flowers. That might be so in a tiny courtyard garden where it is possible to control everything but my garden is so close to natural landscape that you could lose the flowers (sadly) and retain a sense of the place but lose the trees and it would become a wasteland.

The first question was which tree to choose. I was tempted by one of the huge oaks beyond the field or a towering ash but in the end I decided to restrict myself to trees on our land. The big sycamore at the bottom of the drive is a lovely tree. I know people are snotty about sycamore: it is not a native, and not even as old an incomer as the field maple which was brought in by the Romans. But the tree has a comforting bulk about it and in spring the shrimp pink of the new leaves is fleetingly as lovely as any flower. But for quite a lot of the year it doesn't do very much except loom large and green.

I considered the yew trees at either end of the house. I love them, bookending the house with their stately enigmatic presence, but even more than the sycamore they do not change. The dark evergreen foliage hangs calmly down with only the rush of red berries in autumn to bring the thrushes in.

The apple tree in the field would be a good one with the delicate pink of the blossom in spring and the huge flushed fruit in autumn but I look at that anyway. I wanted something which I could neglect but should celebrate.

So here it is, a horse chestnut in the hedge line on the field boundary. It doesn't look that exciting I suppose. It is quite a young tree so has not yet attained the towering presence of a mature tree.

Come closer and you can see the distinctive upward thrust of the branches. Trees without their leaves reveal things about their character. The ash hangs and in winter, without the delicate many fingered foliage, looks messy and shabby. The dense twiggy structure of the head of an oak tree produces a rounded, proud shape. Silver birch is skinny and twiggy but still graceful. The horse chestnut in winter throws itself toward the sky in an echo of the towering candles of flower which it will carry in the spring.

The bark is silvery grey, pale and smooth without deep cracks and fissures because this is a young tree.

The buds will swell over the coming weeks but they are already sticky and shining in the sun.

So there it is: our horse chestnut in January, waiting to burst into life.

Thinking about the garden

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:35:00 +0000

Gardening in January is a miserable thing. Paths are muddy, soil is cold, and all those things you didn't cut down in the autumn so as to be wildlife friendly and which you hoped would stand whorled with frost against a low sun droop and drip sadly in a soggy, bedraggled tangle. All the talk about winter gardens and structure which you can ignore in the summer when your garden is flowering its socks off comes back to haunt you. Yes you do need the hardlandscaping and paths you can't find the time or money to sort out. Yes indeed, you should have more evergreens. I usually cope with January by staying inside by the stove. This year in particular I have been knitting.

I made a Moebius cowl, partly because I loved my first neck warmer so much and partly because I have always been fascinated by the Moebius strip which apparently has no beginning and no end. Actually knitting one was amazing. I still don't really understand how it works as you knit it on a doubled circular needle. It seems as if you cast on in what becomes the middle of the cowl and as you work the cowl becomes deeper and deeper, each new row adding to both the bottom and the top of the coil. Still no wiser? No, I wasn't either. I just followed the instructions with my mouth open in amazement.

Then I made a cable cowl which is probably my favourite of the three. It is very soft and warm and the cable pattern is deeply satisfying to knit. Both these patterns came from a fabulous website called ravelry If you are at all interested in knitting take a look. There is a vast selection of patterns and yarns to look at, many of the patterns are free, and it has transformed me from a clumsy knitter who had done nothing for twenty years or so into a person who can make things she actually wants to wear. The latest project is a cardigan for me, the first full size garment I have made since I was about sixteen when I laboured for months over a jumper which ended up so saggy and baggy that I nearly cried with disappointment and never wore it. When I am not knitting I have my fingers crossed about this latest endeavour. So far so good. If you never see a picture of it you will know it was another disaster.

But today I have worked in the garden, the first garden day of the new year. We are looking after our son's dog for a week so I had to take her for a walk this morning and that set me off feeling like being outside again. A well behaved dog is a good companion in the garden, lying peacefully alongside when I was cutting back hellebore leaves so you can see the newly emerging flowers, snuffling about in the field, occasionally disappearing off to check the corner of the field where the badgers come through or turning up hopefully with a stick for a quick game of retrieve. I cut back a lot of lank perennials and everything in the side garden at least looked better for it. There were places I didn't even get to and there was the usual rush of reminders of how very much there is to do out there but there were snowdrops pushing through and arum leaves gleaming in the weak sun.

I don't think there are as many snowdrops as usual this year although I haven't yet done my totally anal snowdrop count. I wonder if they dislike the milder winter we have had so far. Certainly last year when the hard December snow went huge clumps of them emerged in January although I didn't do my usual job of splitting the clumps to encourage them to spread. It was wonderful to find quite how much space I have for more bulbs in the new bed at the bottom of the field although I couldn't find any of the winter aconites I planted last year. Should they be out now?

I think I might be ready to go outside again.

Time

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 21:56:00 +0000

A few weeks ago Karen at An Artist's Garden blogged about time: not having enough of it, finding it all used up on some of the things she loves while other things she wants to do are forgotten and undone. Judging from the number of comments made, she struck a chord with a lot of us.

I have always been obsessed with time. I remember as a teenager reading Andrew Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress"

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down and think which way

To walk,and pass our long love's day;

Thou by the Indian Ganges'side

Shouldst rubies find;

I by the tide Of Humber would complain.

I would Love you ten years before the Flood;

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires, and more slow.

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long preserv'd virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust.

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may;

And now, like am'rous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour,

Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.

Let us roll all our strength, and all

Our sweetness, up into one ball;

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Thorough the iron gates of life.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

It made me shiver. I felt a delight in the words - the vastness of the vegetable love which for some reason I always saw as a huge cauliflower, the tearing of pleasures through the iron gates of life - shivered over with a ferocious and crushing sense of how brief life is. The sardonic young man who had pressed his lover with the deliciously cruel couplet:

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none I think do there embrace.

was himself dead. Everything passes in the blink of an eye. This life that I was standing on the threshold of was so brief as to be practically meaningless.

It didn't last, that trembling sensation. I don't suppose it could have done without driving me nuts. Life got in the way. It speeded up and opened out like a river full of sailing boats when I went to university. It slowed down to a crawl when my children were small and then the years whirled by in a flurry of work and childcare. Now that the particular feverishness of that juggling is behind me I find increasingly that I do have again that tremulous awareness of how little time there is. You can't look it full in the face. It would strike you blind with fear, like the basilisk. But you can feel it, as Marvell did, at your back, breathing coldly on your neck.

Perhaps it is getting older that causes this, when the life to come is so clearly so much shorter than the life which has already gone.

Perhaps it is a leftover from when I was ill a few years ago and briefly looked at the prospect of stopping living, stopping when I was so far from ready. Perhaps it comes from the impact of my brother's stroke and now my father's illness, making me so acutely aware of what they can no longer do and will not be able to do again. Whatever it is I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to do with the time I have, perhaps not the most productive use of it!

I admire very much the way in which my aged FIL can take whatever pleasure each day provides for him, even though each day is much the same with its mealtimes and its walk and its television, a measured routine which he loves. Yet that same routine can make me feel that my own life is running away through my fingers, one day so like the last that time speeds up and the weeks whirl past like scenes from a speeding car. But I don't want a "bucket list" - thirty places to see before you die, fifty restaurants to eat in, ten great novels to read. That really is not how I work. When I see friends with more freedom to travel than we have at the moment I don't feel any overwhelming envy of them. There is the odd pang. I long to go back to see New Zealand. I would like to visit friends in British Columbia. Both of those may happen sometime. But mostly I am very aware of how fortunate I am to live with people I love in a place that I love and to have the luxury of choosing when and where I work doing something I enjoy. I love my family and see them often, considering that none of them live nearby. I love my friends, and see them not often enough. I love my garden but it would take all the time I could give it and still need more. I love learning my Welsh but don't do enough of it. Is there room in my overcrowded life for more of anything or do I need less of something?

What would I regret if I did not do it might be the question I suppose. It helped me to come to the decision to leave my previous job a couple of years ago. It wasn't that I didn't like my job, in many ways I loved it, but I knew that if I had only five or ten years left I did not want to have spent them doing more of the same. I wanted to spend them with the people I love, doing things that I love. I wanted to have time to make a garden, to make cakes with small children, to sit in a cafe and watch the world go by or drink a glass of wine in the sun with a friend. Ah that is it. Writing it down makes me see. I need to do more idling, both here and away from home I need to do a little less doing and a little more just being. That is what I need to do with some of my time. Be.

End of month view for December and what is in flower on 2nd January

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:53:00 +0000

For most of 2010 and 2011 I took part in the end of month view in the garden, hosted by Helen at Patientgardener It has been fascinating to have a record of the passing months although I must admit I slipped a bit at the end of last year. My garden sadly does not have fabulous bones, even though it is in a fabulous place, and particularly when autumn and winter are windy and wet it all looks rather soggy and sad. So I have decided to cheer myself up by posting pictures of what is in flower in the different areas as well and to my surprise a lot was in flower when I went out with my camera on the 2nd January 2012.

Here is the side garden. How I wish for a crisp gravel path running up towards the gate and out into the field to the workshop. At this time of year the grass is muddy and worn. Truly uninspiring.

But there are things in flower if you take the time to look.

In the foreground of the picture, behind the sweet box, the first of the hellebores has started to flower and just beyond it a single solitary cyclamen shines in the sun.

Out in the field the new orchard is just bare trees and rough grass. There is no sign yet of the little daffodils around the trees.

But in the bare and scruffy cutting garden, two sunflower heads still twist against the sky.

There is a rose in flower in the little garden behind the holiday cottage

and a wallflower coming into flower too.

In the corner of the field the hamamelis mollis came into flower quite suddenly. One day I went to see if it was flowering as it is not on any of my daily paths and is easy to miss. The greybrown twigs were thin and bare. And then I caught a whiff of its scent on my way to the compost heaps and found the fizzing, spidery explosions dancing against the bare branches.

There is nothing happening on the sunny bank from a distance. The little quince tree which has been shedding a branch or two a year for the last three years lost another big branch in the winds. We might have to accept that it is turning up its toes. The wood is brittle and thin. We are thinking about biting the bullet and taking out what is left and planting a new crab apple a little further away from the bench. I fancy a Malus John Downie but would love to know what you would recommend.

On the bank the pink valerian is still throwing up the odd flower. I know this is a thug but the bees and butterflies love it and it grows where other things won't. I intend to be stricter with myself this year in moving the little seedlings to really inhospitable places rather than letting them have the room which could be given to my pinks and irises.

The kitchen garden isn't doing much either. Down at the far end where the hens live there is so much mud it is like a battlefield.

But the pineapple sage is still blooming against the wall. I have taken some of my salvias into the greenhouse but this one survived in the most sheltered spot in the garden through last winter's snow and severe frosts so I hope it will be fine this year. This bed is due for a rethink this year. The far end is grown through with snowberry but I am intending to dig it out and to give the bed over to more salvias, flowering herbs such as rosemary and annual poppies and marigolds.

And back in front of the house, the campanula is still in flower even though there are snowdrop snouts pushing up a few feet away.

Today Ian trimmed the new native hedges in the field for the first time. I am not keen on January and February but at least we are half way through winter now. Soon there will be snowdrops and crocuses and daffodils. I must try not to wish my life away!

Resolution time again

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 16:22:00 +0000

I have been blogging nearly five years! Astonishing. One of the results of this is that, as with any form of diary keeping, I have a record so I have been reading back through the resolutions I have made (or not made) in January 2008 and January 2010. I don't seem to have made any at all in 2009 and certainly every now and then I just decide not to. I did make some last year. Here they are with some thoughts about how they went. That might just be the decider as to whether to make 2012 a "resolving" or a "not resolving" year!

I will make more time with friends and, if going away from home is a bit tricky just now, more invitations for people to come here. Mmm patchy results with this one. I have managed to get away and to spend some time with friends. For the very first time, a year has gone by in which I haven't seen one of my oldest friends although I am about to do something about that. I think I could resolve this one all over again!
I will do something every day that is just for me: a bath, a glass of good wine, half an hour upstairs on the bed with a book. Tick!
I will do something every day that is just for Ian. This is harder than it sounds. He is a great one for sorting everything out for himself and looking after other people all the time. Yes, well I said this was one would be hard and it is. Even when you try to do things for him he tends not to want you to. Maybe every day was a bit ambitious, perhaps once a month might just work!
I will take the time every day to listen to my FIL, just to sit and chat for half an hour without trying to fill the time with jobs and chores. I am getting my ear in now, beginning to understand both the strong regional accent and his own idiolect which means that he can expect you to fill in missing words and translate phrases. Soon I may even always understand the meaning of "the old one, two", a phrase which slides around with, as far as I can tell, an entirely variable meaning, often tripping me up and leaving me grasping at empty air. I will slow down and, for some time every day, let him set the pace. Patchy again, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Oddly I suspect that if I did a bit more of number one, I could manage a bit more of this one! And this year is ending with the need to spend more time with my own mother and father as my father's health worsens and they live three hundred miles away. Tricky.
I will buy and wear some clothes in gorgeous colours. I fancy a singing blue and green like the peacock feathers in the vase behind me. Did some of this but not nearly enough!
I will go to yoga every week and become a truly bendy person. Went quite a bit, didn't stiffen up entirely, true bendiness remains an aspiration.
I think I might join a choir. I think we might say that this one is not going to happen, not enough time, not high enough up the list.
I think I might get a dog, maybe not right this minute though. Ah now this is a biggy and still hanging around a year on. I need to decide once and for all how much I want one. Ian is not keen. I pine. I'm not a piner and don't like myself for doing it. I need to make my mind up one way or the other.
I will plant yet more flowers for butterflies and bees in the field around the fruit trees. Tick! Tick! Tick! Yes I did this one and can do even more. Yay!
I will ensure that I see all the blogging friends I have been lucky enough to meet so far and also add some new ones to the "met in real life" tag. And I did this one too, both keeping up with the ones I had met and meeting VP and Patientgardener here and Beangenie at Karen's. Tick! Tick!
I will paint my toenails, even though it is winter. Mmmm, they were painted but they aren't now...

Well that wasn't too bad. It is clearly not an entire waste of time to make New Year Resolutions now that I have stopped resolving to get fitter and to lose weight and to master successional sowing.

2011 has not been an easy year in many ways so I think the big resolution for 2012 will be to
HAVE MORE FUN, by myself with books and gardening and some pampering (I feel a pedicure coming on), with Ian by walking and taking time out together, even having the odd holiday maybe, with my friends by arranging to meet up with both old and new (I feel a weekend with my oldest friend and a trip to London are both on the cards), with my family by ensuring that we all get together whenever we can both up and down and across the generations.

I am a classic Virgo type, big on duty and hard work.
This year I resolve to find as many occasions as possible for HAVING A BALL!!

The year closes

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:03:00 +0000

I can't be doing with all those big retrospectives for the New Year: the highlights of 2011, whether the big news stories of the year or the nation's favourite television. And yet there is something about the closing year which makes one pause. Partly it is the sheer swiftness of the passing of time. How can I have just dated a letter 30th December 2011? That is a whole year gone in a whirl and a blur, a year older, possibly a year ever so slightly wiser, a year closer to the grave. Not that I feel remotely sad or morbid. We have just had a lovely family Christmas full of all the things which I love (family, food, feasting) and entirely free from the angst and stress and consumerism which seem to colour so much of the journalism in the lead up to Christmas, when we aren't being sold a perfect, unachievable, sentimentalised dream. Ours is a simple Christmas and maybe that is why it generally (not inevitably mind) works. I can give you the recipe if you like:

Take one Welsh farmhouse (or any house or flat really, the venue is not crucial)
Add a bit of preparation so that there are some things in the freezer, the presents are bought and there is not too much last minute panicking to be done.
Don't spend too much.
Bring in your family. If they are easy and lovely they can stay a while. I think you have to have family even if they are cussed and awkward but in that case they should either be briefly visited or brought in and taken away by car, by you, for the shortest possible time. Spend the most time with the people you love the most.
Be nice to each other.
Don't try to spend every waking minute of every day together, in fact everyone should have bits of every day with a little time to him or her self.
Add a couple of dogs if possible which will produce a requirement for groups of people to go out walking and alter the pace of the days and blow the cobwebs away.
Add a small child or two to make you laugh.
Ideally have dishwashers of both the mechanical and the human kind. I am lucky enough to have Ian for whom washing dishes in our new kitchen is practically a hobby.
Eat well. Drink moderately but well. Laugh a lot.
Be aware of how lucky you are.

So the year is ending much more happily than it began. New Year's Day 2011 exploded in our faces with the bombshell of my brother's stroke. It takes time to adjust and his life now is very different to his life before the stroke but things settle and change. The terror and the fear and the sheer unknowability of what is to come settle and fade and a new life and a new pattern emerges. There has been much bravery, even heroism, from him and his family, which is not mine to talk about here but which I can only admire.

My father in law was newly arrived here at this time last year, still needing quite a lot of help and uprooted from the town which had been his home all his life, except for a few years of war service in the Orkneys. As the year ends he is happy and settled too, far more mobile about the house and enjoying the additional family company which comes his way as a result of living with us. That has been a different sort of challenge, learning to share your time and space with someone else again, but the right thing to do, a good thing to do.

My parents are just about to downsize and start a new phase of their lives and my father is not as well now as he was at the beginning of the year which saddens and worries me but they seem to be going into 2012 with their customary determination and good cheer.

Life might not be easy all the time (when was it ever?) but it is good.

And the wonderful thing about gardening is that there is a whole new year to plan and dream for and to get it right in, or parts of it!

Happy New Year to everyone who reads this blog. I am very glad to know you all, in whatever way, large or small, real or virtual. I wish you all the very best for 2012.

Nearly ready for Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:32:00 +0000

The family have started to arrive. First came elder daughter, her husband and two year old son, arriving late on Tuesday night with J asleep in the car. They are installed in the holiday cottage. Then came younger daughter with her dog, a young and beautiful red fox labrador and then younger son and his wife and their dog, an equally beautiful black labrador and yesterday younger daughter's boyfriend.

So now we are all here until Christmas Day when we hope to see older son. The house is full. When we sit down to eat we are eight or nine at the table. The tree has been dug up from the field and brought inside in a pot. It looks way bigger inside than it did out there!

We don't go in for tasteful Christmas trees here. Christmas is not Christmas without too many sets of lights, decorations of all colours and all the old favourites on the tree.

The slightly squiffy snowman has to have his place and a new favourite to add to the old ones is the Christmas sheep.

The Christmas cake, made by elder daughter and decorated by her, younger daughter and younger daughter's boyfriend, has a Frozen Planet theme this year. Frozen Planet for non UK readers is a new series narrated by David Attenborough which has been shown on the TV this autumn. Watch out for it, it is truly stunning.

I think they have surpassed themselves this year. Note particularly the mother and baby seal joining in the fun and the horizontally sliding penguin on his way to collide with the mystery tree.

Mincepies have been made in quantity along with mulled wine by younger son. Black dog and yellow dog have behaved pretty well and two year grandson has contributed by running around, laughing a lot and crying "Wassat?" Daughter in law's contributions to the festive scene are hanging from the hooks in the beams where they used to cure the hams, and her Christmas dog is on the tree.

And now we have reached that bit of Christmas Eve when there is nothing more to be done. Nothing else to be made or bought, only the big meal to come tomorrow.

So I am off for a glass of wine and a look at how my baked ham is coming along and to enjoy the company of my family. I wish you all a very happy Christmas, wherever you are and however you are celebrating.

Making winter in Wales

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:59:00 +0000

I love the idea of making things in winter so I joined the Making Winter bloghop over at Thrifty Household. There are some seriously talented people doing some very exciting things. I am not an artist or a real craftsperson but I have decided to be less apologetic about my own making and doing and just to enjoy it, in all its glorious amateurism! I had a huge chunk of my life when working and family sucked up all my time and energy and the two constants which I somehow carved out time for were cooking and gardening. Sewing and knitting and making things disappeared from view. Now when I am rushing from pillar to post and wondering what happened to my wish for a simpler life, I need to remind myself that I have got some time back. In the last year or two I have returned to the skills I learnt in my childhood from my grandmothers and practised in adolescence in New Zealand where clothes were expensive to buy and everyone made things. I rarely sit down in the evenings now without some knitting or crochet in my hands and I am starting, after a while of having to just enjoy the process, to produce things that I love.

I do tend to get quite easily bored though and so I love learning to do something I have never done before. Knitting in the round is a current favourite and this neckwarmer pleases me a lot.

It comes from a lovely book called "Weekend Knitting" by Melanie Falick which was also the source of an easy fingerless gloves pattern. It is just full of things you want to have a go at. This is made in brioche stitch which uses two different colours of wool.

So it is entirely reversible. I must admit I had to start it, pull it back after a few rows and start again five times so you can tell I am not the most expert knitter around! But when I had finally got the pattern, the neckwarmer grew quite quickly and the magic of the stitch really pleased me.

Since I finished it I seem to have worn it pretty much every time I have been outside. The double strand of wool makes it incredibly cosy and unlike scarves, my other big love in winter, it doesn't dangle into the chicken feed or get caught up in the greenhouse door. Now I have found a pattern for a Moebius scarf and am itching to have a go at that but I need some new needles first!

There is something so rhythmic and almost meditational in knitting or crochet and the right pattern needs enough of your mind to be absorbing but leaves you with enough left over to be able to talk if you want to. Unlike a really good book which I fall into like going down a hole and which makes me totally antisocial until I have finished it, or machine sewing which takes you away from people and away from the fire, knitting is companionable. I know that when spring comes I will be up and away outside and all my knitting will be packed away until winter comes again but I rather like the seasonality of it. It is all part of the rhythm of my life.

The last of the damson gin is bottled too and the damsons stoned ready to be made into a chocolate, apple and damson betty. I am hoping that as the damsons have been sitting in sugar and gin for a couple of months they will help to produce a boozy sophisticated take on a family favourite pudding when our children start arriving for the Christmas holiday in a couple of days time.

And then there is the damson gin. I am thinking that it would be OK to taste a small glass, just to make sure that it is up to scratch before offering it to others. That's fair, do you think?

Food for Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:57:00 +0000

I love Christmas dinner. I don't get tired of it. I love turkey. I love roast potatoes. Most of all I love the extras: really good stuffing, pigs in blankets, red cabbage, roast parsnips, bread sauce and gravy. I don't feel like experimenting with goose or rib of beef, much though I love both. I don't want to do unusual things with salmon and prawns. I am a traditionalist. For Christmas, only a turkey dinner will do.

This year our turkey will come from friends who somehow find the time and energy to run their family, a business and a part time teaching career while keeping sheep and hens, sometimes pigs and, in the months coming up to Christmas, turkeys. This is about as local as you can get without raising your own. The turkeys will have scratched and strutted in their little orchard about a mile and half away. They are fed organically, mature slowly, and will eventually be slaughtered locally too.

The potatoes are our own home grown ones. I'd like to be able to tell you that the parsnips will be ours too but that would be a lie. Parsnips stubbornly refused to germinate for us this year so they and the brussel sprouts (notice they are not in the litany of things I love!) will come from our local shop. The sausagemeat and the bacon are from the local butcher. Apples and onions in the stuffing are home grown and the bread in the bread sauce is home made.

I hope that the people sitting round the table - our children and their partners and our small grandchildren, gathered from Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Derbyshire and Manchester - will have travelled further than any of the food in their dinner. Ah I had forgotten the dried fruit in the Christmas pudding! The puddings were made in my kitchen on Stir Up Sunday in November but the raisins and currants have come from much further than Wales as have the nutmeg and spices. That's OK though. Spices from the East. That's an honourable tradition!

What will be on your plates on Christmas Day?

Doors

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:45:00 +0000

Doors, gates: do they shut you out or invite you in? I can never see a beautiful door or gate without wanting to open it and find out what is on the other side but doors in themselves can be lovely things. I was so taken with some pictures of doors from Rachel at slow lane life that I wandered around looking again at our doors and I thought I would share them. Some are pretty ordinary; some much less so.

Here is the front door. Like most farmhouse front doors it is never used. No one ever comes in through the front door but if you did and closed it behind you, you would find this.

At the top is the latch, possibly made in the forge that used to belong to the farm and which is now part of the holiday cottage. Below that is the key, a good six inches long and nearly as big as my hand, and the lock into which it fits. They still work. Below them is a wooden bolt. There is another similar one upstairs and I think this one has been fashioned to be like that. It looks as if this bolt is a replacment for an older one. This door won't be the oldest in the house as the porch was put on about two hundred and fifty years ago but it is a very lovely thing.

This is the door you would come through, straight into the kitchen. It is a stable door so you can open up the top in the summer and let the light and air in, but keep the chickens out. Look back through the glass and the angles are crazy.

Come through to the sitting room and these are the old doors with their strap hinges and boarded construction. They all have iron latches like this on one side and this

on the other.

The great thing about a latch like this is that it is impossible to open the door quietly and every latch in the house has a slightly different sound to it. When you live here and get your ear attuned, the door from my father in law's room makes a different sound to the sitting room door which is different again from the new door from the back kitchen into the corridor. The house tells you what is happening and who is where!

The old doors are oak and presumably date from about 1600 when the house was built. The new doors are in the extension that was put on about thirty years ago. When we came here we tried to match the doors in the extension to the old doors so we had some made. These are pine not oak but they too are boarded doors of a similar construction to the oak ones and with metal latches.

Upstairs the doors are old too, with wooden handles and latches, some perhaps original and some repaired. I wonder who scorched the door and with what? A careless candle?

I love the fact that someone took the trouble to make an elegant hinge for the bedroom door.

Looking along the corridor towards the bedroom door is one of my favourite lines of sight in the house.

But doors don't have to be wooden to be beautiful.

A year apart: the 5th December

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:26:00 +0000

I love the seasons. What would it be like to live in a constant temperature? A constant spring? An endless summer? An everlasting cold? No, I love the change.

And here in the UK the seasons themselves are mutable. Summer is often not hot and dry. Spring might not be an unfurling of life but icy, cold and wet. And this autumn has not been damp and blustery but long and warm and mellow as caramel. Winter has come now but how different this mild late born winter is from last year's lion's grip, the whole world stilled under his heavy paw.

This is the 5th of December last year, steely under snow, and then the same date this year, all sun and silhouetted trees.

This year there are marigolds still throwing out flowers. A year ago today the field was blanketed under snow.

Green and gold fennel this year and monochrome hedges last.

Rose hips and snow.

I love seasons.

I'm a celebrity - no, I don't think so!

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:55:00 +0000

I have been tagged by one of my most favourte people, Caroline at Village Fate. I don't normally do memes, not because I am too posh but because I don't think I have much new to say, but who knows?

1. What is the one thing about being a parent that makes you scream, ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE!’
My kids are flown. When they were younger the thing that drove me mad was daily cooking. I love cooking. I love food. It was coming in through the door, knowing that the need for fuel was so overwhelming it didn't matter what is was, and then cooking in my coat. That was the challenge.

2. What skills, if any, do you have that would be useful in the jungle?
I very rarely get cross. When everyone else is in meltdown, I am probably in melt middle.

3. How are you likely to annoy people if you were stuck with them for three weeks?
It depends how much you mind that I am always right.

4. What is the worst thing you have ever eaten?
Something I have cooked on a very, very bad day.

5. What luxury item would you take into the jungle with you?
Mascara. Well you have to be able to see my eyes which is helped by a frame. I suppose Tilda Swinton manages so maybe I just need a new way of looking at the whole question.

6. What is the most daring thing you have ever done?
Daring? Can't remember. Climbed mountains with vertigo, gave presentations to strangers, ate odd stuff? Got divorced? Had kids? (not that way round). Actually never knew having kids was brave until I did it. Then, oh my god.

7. Who would you miss most if you went into the jungle with a bunch of strangers?
Ian. Children are following very close on his heels

8. What celebrity, alive or dead, would you like to have with you in the jungle?
Ray Mears. He could do his fabulous stuff. I could admire it.

9. What would scare you about being in the jungle?
Some sort of grub.

10. After leaving the jungle, you go to a luxury hotel. What’s the first thing you do?
Shower. Eat. How do you ever choose which to do first?

Being very bad at Christmas shopping

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 20:28:00 +0000

I have never been a great shopper. I am always puzzled by the idea of retail "therapy" and am mildly astonished that many perfectly lovely and intelligent people seem to enjoy spending time in huge shopping centres like Bluewater, Westfield or, my personal bete noire, the Trafford Centre. Too much choice makes me shut down and too much pressure to spend turns me into a one woman awkward squad and makes me hang onto to my purse.

There is not a lot of shopping you can do up here anyway. We are not totally in the middle of nowhere. In twenty minutes or so you can be in any one of three nice small towns, Mold, Denbigh or Ruthin, where you can do a supermarket shop if you want to, find some good small shops and buy a decent cup of coffee. There are some lovely independent retailers too like Homewood Bound and the Craft Centre just down the road at Afonwen but you have to travel forty five minutes or so to get to Chester to find a proper city. In fact Chester is a very fine small city and has lots of individual shops, the antithesis of the out of town retail park, but even so I only get there a couple of times a year.

If you don't shop, oddly, if you are me, you don't want to shop. The less you do, the less you want to do. I don't miss it or ever begin to feel like I need a fix. That sounds both virtuous and puritanical which is misleading. I am not a great consumer but I do love some particular beautiful things. I buy some stuff online and most of my normal purchases are to do with the garden: plants by mail order, seeds and bulbs, especially bulbs and books of course. It takes something like getting ready for Christmas to drive me out to the shops. I would love to be able to tell you that, like Silverpebble and Thrifty Household I have been making winter. I admire it hugely. I aspire to do it. I look at the beautiful things which are made by truly talented people and wonder if I could do it too if I just keep trying.

But all my winter projects take so long that they are very unlikely to produce any delightfully handmade Christmas presents. There are the socks which are now entering their second winter under construction.

They are not going to be a present any time soon, and besides I labour over them so long I think I will have to keep them as no one else will appreciate them as I will.

There is the huge superkingsize blanket which is about a third of the way there.

It's too huge for a present. It is for the house really. The idea of giving it to any of my children is simply a joke.

There are things I have finished of course: the Christmas puddings are done and waiting in the pantry; the damson gin is mostly bottled, just waiting for a fourth bottle which suits the purpose to emerge from the recycling.

But somehow nothing that I have done can count as a present for anyone. I am intrigued by the idea of giving only presents that I have made although I can't guarantee that some of the likely recipients wouldn't be appalled. I think to do it properly I would have to plan for most the year. There are things I am confident with: foodbased presents I could do and know that the results would be worth eating. I might be able to sew or knit but I am not confident that the results would merit the time and effort it would take and how do you know that your taste would be the taste of the person you made it for? How awful to have spent weeks labouring over something and to know in your bones that the receiver of the present was wondering how long it would be before they could give it away or hide it. I think it is a confidence thing. Perhaps it should be my project for 2012, or I could spend 2012 thinking about it and have a go in 2013, or 2014.

So in the meantime, there are no presents and there is shopping.

I think shopping may be something that you need to train for and then practise to keep your hand in, a bit like tabletennis or ballroom dancing. I stopped in Chester on the way back from work the other day, sure that I could do most of what I needed to buy. It is not a huge amount: presents for twelve people since some will be done by gifts of money and with some we have mutually agreed not to buy presents in this straitened, recessionary year. I didn't get past the first shop I went into. It was a truly beautiful kitchen equipment shop. I expect I was drawn in because my lovely new kitchen has been filling my head with kitchens. It took me forty five minutes to stop looking at things for me, entirely theoretically as most of them cost an arm and a leg, and another forty to choose two presents which may or not be things my nearest and dearest want. These were heavy to carry and my head was swimming so I came home.

Back to the internet for me I think. At least the distraction level is lower and things don't make your arms ache. Or I do make a very good cake and have a very quick and easy pattern for fingerless gloves.

Scenes from my kitchen - nearly the end of the series!

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:08:00 +0000

The tiling is just about done, only the grouting to go. Then I can use the kitchen properly! Then it might not look quite as empty and lovely as it does just now, so now could be the time to show it off.

Here is where we started.

And this is probably about as bad as it got with the cupboards out and the ceiling down.

Here we have come a long way but there is still a lot to do. The electrics are in, the new plastering is done and the slate floor is underway.

The slate floor is down and grouted and Ian starts work on the framework which will make new shelving down one side of the kitchen.

And in the blink of an eye (he may throw something at me when he reads this) here are the shelves, ready and raring to go.

Then there was a small hiatus while we waited for the Ikea delivery. When it came it was an exciting day. The delivery lorry was huge and was reversed down our drive excrutiatingly slowly by the skilful driver. When he got to the big sycamore he had to stop and the boxes, what seemed like hundreds of them, had to be carried over the gravel, over the cobbles and in through the front kitchen.

Here we go, worktop on, wall cupboards going up. Notice the black outside the window? Night and day, he worked, night and day.

And now it really starts to look like a kitchen and not a work in progress.

The tiles just need grouting now.

And the custom-made shelves are a delight - shelves for my jugs, and even special places for trays which previously lived in the pantry and fell on to my feet pretty much every day when I opened the door.

There is even a little shelf for my egg cups!

Tulips, autumn, mess and tangle

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 19:47:00 +0000

This week I went to see Karen at Artists Garden and drove the high and lovely road West across Wales to the sea. I love this road. I have driven it in sun and in rain and in winter, summer and autumn and whenever I drive it the high emptiness of the Denbigh moors followed by the slow and beautiful descent to the sea makes my heart sing.

Karen had also arranged for me to meet Kate at Beangenie guessing rightly that we would have a lot in common so it was day for wandering around their gardens, sitting outside a lot, drinking lots of tea and relishing good company.

Karen's garden is very different from my own both in size and in the style of planting. Her garden is a late summer and autumn garden and sure enough there was still colour from a whole bed of salvias shimmering in the still sunlight. And there was movement too, even on a windless day, from the grasses firing upwards like fireworks or fountaining gently in flowing curves down by the studio. My garden has been ignored for a while and, battered by wind but somehow still growing, it has become a tangled mass of flop and decay.

Kate's I thought might be more like mine because I knew she too has a spring garden and loves bulbs and has a wildflower meadow. But Kate's garden, while nothing like Karen's was nothing like mine either. It is mainly green at this time of year but with strong clear structure from hedges and paths, cool and calm with each of its three distinct areas catching a different feeling even without their colour and flower.

So no tangled mess there then.

And today was full of sunlight when I woke up. Time to stop pretending the garden has gone to sleep when it so clearly has not and give it some time and love.

When you garden in a wild sort of way it is amazingly easy for things to slip from sweet disorder into bedraggled chaos. Some things are showing their structure simply by virtue of losing their leaves.

The old hedges are lovely at all times of the year. I love the new growth in spring but I love it too when the shapes of the branches emerge, twisted and interwoven.

But mostly there is simply a sense that everything is falling over and into everything else, still growing somehow in this impossibly long warm autumn but growing in a messy, desperate way that almost makes me long for cold and a stop and some winter silence. There was so much to do that I had to fall back on the trick of making myself focus just on one place, the side garden today, as too much wandering about and looking at the garden was making me feel like living in a small flat on the Cote d'Azur with a pot of African violets. I cut back and moved things and took six enormous wheelbarrows of plant material to the big compost heap in the field.

And then I planted out some of my huge tulip order.

These are Tulipa Acuminata. This is a Peter Nyssen image as are the ones below and all my tulip order is from them. The range is great and the quality very high. I have planted tulips out in December lots of times and they don't seem to mind at all, in fact it is better to plant them out late than too early, so it is not too late to get an order in. I am not sure about Acuminata as I have never grown them before. It may be that when they flower the etiolated blooms will be just too spidery and odd but I do love the colours and they may have a delicacy which will be rather fine. I also planted more Ballerina.

I might put some Hermitage in tomorrow as well. The Hermitage are quite small, the Acuminata a littletaller and the Ballerina taller still.

I have barely scratched the surface of what is to be done, in fact I might not have found the surface yet.

It was odd working in the garden again and finding things flowering in the confusion of a warm November.

There were primroses out on the bank and as I cut back the alchemilla there was new growth appearing at the base. I am torn between unease at the muddying of the seasons and the pleasure of the sun on my back.

In the wooden greenhouse the scented leaf geraniuns are still flowering away. I need to cut them down and put them somewhere frost free for the winter but I can't bring myself to stop the profusion of flower just yet.

Apples hang on some of the trees like Christmas baubles. We have had such a huge crop this year there is nowhere to store them any more, fifteen bags or so are hanging in the workshop and we have given away almost as many.

The large number of windfalls pleases the hens though.

And amongst the dead and dying beans and tomatoes in the kitchen garden, my pineapple sage is having a last mad fling. I do hope the sun shines tomorrow.

How is it where you are? Has your garden closed down for winter yet or is it as confused as mine?

Sorting out the pantry

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:55:00 +0000

The kitchen is so very nearly ready. Slowly we are bringing things in from the utility room and colonising the cupboards. The worktops are in, smooth and pale hardwood, satisfyingly honey coloured against white cupboards and the dark slate floor. We have bought the wall tiles now, also grey, a beautiful pale pearly grey. They are just waiting for Ian to have time to do the tiling. Grey might sound a bit dreary but they are beautiful, trust me. The dishwasher is working, alleluia. It is all very nearly ready.

And sorting out the kitchen brings all sorts of other sorting out in its wake. This weekend was the turn of the pantry. I love having a pantry. I have always wanted one. It's hard to say exactly why, in this age of fridges and freezers, but I love a pantry. My grandmother had one and I used to love the ingredients all lined up and the pies and cakes, covered on their big plates on the slab. This is the first house to have a pantry that I have ever owned, a proper one with a huge slate slab like my grandmother's. It used to have a lino floor but now it has a slate floor like the kitchen so it is even more beautiful!

The pantry was full to bursting. We brought across some of my father in law's supplies when he came to live with us: lentils, pearl barley, bags and bags of sugar (is there a war on?), tins of this and tins of that and everything has been accommodated. We have loads of stuff of our own too. I never used to run much of a store cupboard when I lived in cities, but here I do. You don't want to find you have no flour half way through a recipe if the only answer is to get in the car and drive to the nearest town so nowadays we run a store cupboard to rival Delia, which makes for some very full shelves. So we did some pantry sorting and reorganising, doing it together so we both knew what was happening.

What a lot of stuff we have which I had totally forgotten about, or never even knew I had. We have tinned potato salad (why?) and tins and tins of mushy peas These, for non UK readers, are either a Northern delicacy or a strange green slush, depending on your taste. I think we can be pretty sure that my father in law has a connection with the mushy peas. We have bottles and bottles of differently flavoured vinegars and oils and soy sauce and anchovy essence and tabasco. These have definitely been brought in by me. We have six different kinds of rice: short grain pudding rice, risotto rice, basmati, long grain, wild rice and, to our sudden delight, we rediscover a packet of Riz de Camargue, a present from our friends in Provence. We haven't been eating much rice since my father in law came. He is a meat and two veg man of the old school. But he is also very accommodating and would happily eat one thing while we ate another, or even have a go to please us, which is not bad for ninety three. So, time to find a recipe which will do justice to the fabulous rice from the Camargue.

You know how, when you walk around the garden, there are plants which remind you of your favourite people? Cuttings from a friend's garden which remind you of her generosity? The shrub rose which was a present from your mother? The cosmos grown from some seed which came in a little packet along with a birthday card from a friend far away? Sorting out the pantry is rather similar. Here is a jar of pickled fish which came back with our son and daughter from a holiday in Scandinavia. Let us draw a veil over when. Elizabeth II was on the throne I believe. Who will eat it? Not me, I suspect. Here is some homemade mincemeat, made by son and daughter in law a year or so ago but still good. That is the wonder of good mincemeat: the alcohol keeps working, the dried fruit keeps steeping. The spices don't overpower. Put in on the "keep" shelf.

Here is jar of Marmite. I didn't even know we had any. Marmite is not my cup of tea. To my palate it tastes of nothing but preservatives but I know plenty of people who love it, including Ian. Here is a jar of japonica jelly from another friend, sweetly scented, slightly exotic. Here are some Kilner jars which originally contained preserved fruit made by a daughter for a Christmas when there was little money for presents. Here, remarkably enough, is a packet of Linseed. Neither of us can remember buying it or what it was for but it looks interesting and should surely be combined with natural yoghurt and blueberries for a healthy breakfast one day when I can bear to give up my usual breakfast egg.

And gradually things order. Some things are thrown away. Things go back on the shelves in a considered, friendly way. Generally our daughters, especially the younger one, operate a fridge police service and leave the pantry alone but they are all home for Christmas. You never know, someone might find the pasta with the 1998 date on it. Quick, put it in the bin. Other things go back on the shelves, for the time being accessible.

It is all satisfyingly ordered and tidy. The eggs from the Light Sussex (who are still busily laying every day when all the others have stopped for the winter) are in their tray on the slate slab. Rice and pasta and pulses are all in storage jars lined up in their place. Aprons are hung behind the door.

It all looks lovely. Maybe this weekend I will make some Christmas puddings. I think I have everything!

Too much stuff

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 22:01:00 +0000

Once upon a time I used to travel light. I could be ready and off and out the door in about ten minutes with a little rucksack on my back and my purse in my pocket. That was before the days of mobile phones and digital cameras. I think life was simpler then but it might simply be that I was - simpler, younger, lighter.

I began to acquire stuff when I acquired my own house. Prior to that I had lived in a series of furnished, rented places where moving from one flat to another could be done on foot in an afternoon with a couple of cardboard boxes and the aforementioned rucksack. Buying a house was part of getting married and that was followed very swiftly by having a baby. We didn't have much money but nevertheless stuff poured in remorselessly through the door like floodwater: furniture and pans and crockery and cushions, a cot and a pram and toys and a steriliser and a car seat. When we separated while the children were still small my then husband didn't want any of the things which had been in the house. I think it was partly that we had created a home for the children and he didn't want to leave it with gaping holes in it and partly that he didn't want to divide things into piles, to talk about it, to be either too nice or too grasping. He would rather start again.

I minded a little bit although I understood and honoured his motives. I would have liked the chance to get rid of the cast offs and hand me downs with which our house was furnished but that wasn't going to happen. There was no money so there was no choice.

And here we are a lot of years on and the hand me downs are long gone. I don't think I am a materialistic person yet if you asked me what I would save from a burning house I would say nothing. The important bits of my life are people or they are in my head. Would I miss things? Yes I would - the picture of my parents on their wedding day, my children's school reports, the piece of driftwood brought back from the side of a Scottish loch. I like my best china, my sewing machine, books by the lorry load, the beautiful 17th Century Welsh cupboard which is the only valuable (and we are talking relative here) piece of furniture I have ever owned. But would I save one thing over another? No I don't think so. If the people were safe, only the cat.

So how is it then that we have so many things? I have books I never read and clothes I never wear. We have CDs we never listen to and DVDs we never watch. We have outbuildings bursting at the seams with stuff. We have all our own stuff and now we have my father in law's stuff, although edited quite cheerfully and ruthlessly by him in a practical, laughing way which was a model of its kind.

I think this has been brought on by moving into our new kitchen, which is another materialism I suppose. I have never had a new kitchen before and I love it. It is beautiful and has not cost a lot because of a combination of an unease with spending which on a grand day might be called ethical, plain and simple meanness and Ian's ability to do so much himself. I shall show you some pictures next time. But in moving back into the kitchen after nearly five months of squeezing around the end of the table and carrying the dishes outside, I have been amazed that we can still can find things to send to the charity shop. We had the biggest clear out in the world, well in my world, six years ago when we came here. I don't think we buy much. The pans I am using were mostly bought nearly twenty years ago. In 2008 I bought a single Furi knife which I refer to mentally as my new knife as I still use every day a couple of knives which I have had for thirty years. So how come there is all this stuff?

Does it breed? Do other people smuggle their stuff into my house when I think they are coming for coffee? Do delivery men bring a case of wine which I sign for and a couple of cases of not very useful and slightly grubby things which they sneak into a dark corner of the kitchen while I am wielding the electronic pen?

Coed Nant Gain - Ancient Woodland

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:59:00 +0000

I am sitting here feeling a bit sorry for myself with a sore throat and a muzzy head that has kept sending me back to bed for the last couple of days. This evening I have manged to get up and sit by the woodburner but I am still feeling dopey and dozy and lethargic. So I thought I would distract myself by telling you about a visit last weekend to a rare and beautiful place.

Coed Nant Gain is a piece of ancient woodland near the village of Cilcain in Flintshire. Its owner, Iliff Symey, has devoted the last twenty five years of his life to caring for this place which he calls "old growth ancient woodland". Ancient woodland in England and Wales is defined as woodland which has been in existence since 1600 or before. This woodland is much more than four hundred years old, possibly thousands of years and certainly stretches back into prehistory. This wood was in existence when the iron age hillforts such as Penycloddiau and Moel Arthur which sit above my farmhouse were occupied way before the Romans came. It sits on the side of steep valley (nant is a brook or small valley in Welsh) so it has not been a wood which is easy to work and this perhaps accounts in part for the way it has been left undisturbed for so long. Read Iliff's article and look at his website which explains the origins of the wood and his approach to its care far better than I could.

The North Wales Wildlife Trust had been looking for volunteers to help with the planting of an ash dome in a natural amphitheatre within the wood. Iliff is concerned to protect the genetic stock which forms his woodland so all the saplings to be used would be lifted from the wood itself and moved to the dome site.

Tree trunks have been laid in a circle to produce natural seating and in the centre of the open circle is an area of flat ground which contains a fire basket. The plan was to add to the ash saplings which were already forming part of an arc around the centre of the amphitheatre to create most a of circle. As they grow the ashes will be woven together to make a dome. The only other dome like this that I know about was created by the artist David Nash If ours looks anything like his in thirty years time that would be wonderful, whether or not I am here to see it.

Working in a wood of this age and planting trees which will be here long after you have gone is oddly calming.

Here is one of my trees. Behind it you can see the stones which came out of the hole. It is good to know that I am not the only one whose land is full of stones.

In front of the amphitheatre the ground falls away steeply to the stream in the bottom of the valley. The wood is full of ash, beech, oak and holly. At this time of year the beech in particular is glorious.

It was a strange day, snatched from ordinary working and followed by too much driving across the country and a rush of work and feeling unwell. I am not sure I have processed it yet. The sight and smell of the wood, the colours, the faint scent of decay, the sound of the leaves underfoot remain with me though.

I am glad there are places like Coed Nant Gain in this country still and people like Iliff obsessive enough to give their lives to their care.

End of month view for October

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 23:27:00 +0000

Slightly late (and confessing that somehow I managed to miss last month entirely) here is the end of month view for October, hosted by Helen at patientgardener

I have lost it a bit with the garden as the winds blow. The winds here in our bit of North Wales have been from the South and East for more than a week. The good thing about that is that the temperatures are higher than usual for the beginning of November. The bad thing is that our house is perfectly protected from the westerly and north westerly winds which prevail around here. We are tucked down and barely feel a ripple as the winds go by. A south easterly though comes roaring across the valley and shakes the yew trees and drives me inside. Today the wind had gone and it was a still, blue and gold day. I planted some of the ludicrous numbers of tulip bulbs bought from Peter Nyssen out into the cutting garden - two of the big squares, both in triangles of Abu Hassan and Ballerina.

I love them both. I have been growing Ballerina for so long now that there is a part of me that feels it is becoming a cliche but its lovely form and singing colour still works so brilliantly that I shall not change for the sake of novelty. There is plenty of other room in the garden for varieties I have not grown before.

The side garden is now almost entirely foliage. The hellebores and sweet box (sarcococca humilis) in the foreground will become more and more important as we go into winter. It's not very exciting but it's not dreadful either as the contrasting colours and forms of the foliage take over from colour.

Out in the field it is the changing leaf colour which is most striking. All the wildflowers have gone and the grass has been cut. The damson and cherry are losing their golden leaves while the wild cherry at the back is a fine red/gold.

The cutting garden has finished really. Everything is battered and much is flattened and gone to seed. Yet there is still beauty in the cosmos, flowering as ever right to the wire. I had totally given up hope of the acidanthera in the centre here when it suddenly burst into beautiful and delicate flower more reminiscent to my eye of spring. The annual rudbeckia has also gone on and on pumping out yellow and mahogany flowers above its rather coarse and uninspiring foliage.

Down along the field boundary the new bed which I have filled with hellebores and hardy geraniums is also focussed on leaf colour.

The sunny bank looks a bit bare where we have lost some of the conifer and, as it fell into the old quince tree and snapped it, some of the quince too. But get closer and there are still salvias and valerian flowering away and it is full of bees and hoverflies when the moment is right. Not this moment obviously. They saw me coming.

This is a picture which should come with some sort of disclaimer. The kitchen garden is a total mess of weeds and dying plants at the moment but somehow this picture makes it look ok. Do not be fooled. The camera does, after all, lie.

At the far end of the garden where the chickens are supposedly enclosed when they feel like it, the two new houses which hold the Scots Dumpies and the new Welsummers have created a feeling of chicken city. Any minute now I expect them to be hanging out their washing on lines strung between the runs and setting up stalls selling street food.

There are some unexpected pleasures too. The wall at the end of the drive, although of old stone, is normally just a wall. At this time of year the cotoneaster which covers it is a red, geometric beauty. I know cotoneaster can be invasive but here it is not and the shapes it creates are beautiful. By Christmas if we get cold weather all these berries will have been taken by birds.

And these are not really garden pictures at all I suppose but I love the way the rosehips swell and the trees begin to reveal their shapes as the leaves fall.

Things that make me feel good

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:27:00 +0000

Sometimes it is the simplest things that make you feel good if only you can slow down enough to really notice them.

A still clear morning, trembling with dew. That stillness and sun has all blown away now in a gusting cold wind, but it was there, for a day.

A visit on Monday from some blogging friends, mountainear, snailbeachshepherdess, bodran and bluestocking mum - tea, cake, more tea, even more cake and vast amounts of talk and laughter. Things have not been easy for everyone over the last year or so and yet there seemed to be nothing we couldn't talk about or laugh at. It doesn't happen more than twice a year but it's amazing how easy it is to catch up and how our lives intertwine.

The sight and size and gentle furriness of the quinces which Felicity brought for me. Aren't they beautiful?

A full log basket and a fire in the woodburner.

A full glass.

Three perfect eggs from the Light Sussex hens.

A video of my two year grandson sitting in his cot by himself, singing (to the educated ear) "The Wheels on the Bus" while admiring the diggers on the quilt his mother made him.

Tales from my kitchen

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 21:25:00 +0000

I haven't really turned my back on the garden. I made the mistake of wandering around in yesterday's sunshine and it clamoured at me about all the things that still need doing. But before I get out there and try to sort things out a bit I thought you might like to have an update about the kitchen. If nothing else, seeing how truly vile it used to be might make you feel better about your own house!

This is really as close as I get to a "before" picture, as shown in house and garden magazines. The main reason for the absence of "befores" is that it was so dingy, mouldy and generally dreadful that I couldn't bring myself to take pictures in it. So in this picture the horrible eighties cupboards and the marked and stained worktops have come out, but you get the general idea.

Here we are with the ceiling coming down so that Steve, the wonder electrician, could put in the new electrics.

Here is the ceiling, decorating the floor. We are in July now, in case you are wondering.

New electrics coming and new ceiling, thanks to Roger, the wonder plasterer.

And here we have all the electrics and now the new slate floor is emerging, thanks to Ian the wonder husband.

I love the slate floor. Now it's getting really exciting.

Ian has built shelves down the wall which the kitchen, in a small extension built in the early 1980s, shares with the old house.

This has not been the easiest of tasks. As you can see, the old house does not believe in straight lines or right angled corners.

All the more extraordinary that it has ended up looking like this.

We still have no units or worktops or tiles but we do have the sense that it is all about to happen. And then the workaday, dishwashery, scullery bits of kitchen life will happen in here and the eating and cooking and sitting around the big table will happen in the front kitchen in the old part of the house.

I just can't wait.

Autumn projects

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:58:00 +0000

OK, rant over. Normal service is resumed. It was great though to find how many of you share my wish that we could all relax, accept that we grow older, and be comfortable in our own skin.

Saturday here was a beautiful golden day, autumn at its absolute best. Younger son and daughter in law were staying for the weekend and we all went walking. I love the way here that you can walk, really walk with grass and heather, hills and views to the horizon, right from the door.

The dog loved it too. You can just see her at the top of the path, whizzing back to check where we were, before heading off again at a joyous lope.

As we walked up to the end of the road we met a local farmer. "Better just hop over the stile there" he said. "I'm bringing the cattle down." Safely on the far side of the gate, we watched as the herd came down from the hill, driven from behind by two guys on one very small moped.

I don't know how many there were, sixty or seventy perhaps, all determined to eat whatever they could snatch as they powered down the hill.

Our daughter in law was determinedly collecting fungi. She has an amazing eye for even the smallest. This is only a fraction of what she brought home and these we identified, with reasonable certainty, from my fungi book. She was all for eating them, or at least the chanterelles on the left, but Chris was determined that she should not. One of the troubles with medical training is that you are far too close to the horror stories about people who died following misidentification of mushrooms, so rather sadly we threw them away. Oh for the French system of taking them to the pharmacist! What a civilised country.

We ate a lot, drank some wine, chatted and caught up with each other. When they went the house seemed very quiet and empty - in the last fortnight we have had two visiting dogs and visits from our younger daughter as well and all that lovely warmth and life was a delight. It's a bit quiet now.

You can tell when autumn has really arrived up here because the garden shrinks away and stops occupying most of my brain. This is a real relief. I love my garden. I obsess about it for most of the year but by the time October is blowing out I am close to fed up with it. I have had enough. I want some time and head space back for other things. Does this happen to other gardeners? Just to turn my back on it, to sod the dandelions and the overgrown artemisia, not to think about it and let the garden go is a relief. I will get out there sometime in November. I will plant tulips and tidy up a bit, although I will leave a lot for the birds, but just now I have had enough. I am wholly ready to turn my back, go inside and shut the door.

It is time to dig out the knitting which was put away in the spring. Firstly the socks on double pointed needles.

This is only my second pair of knitted socks. I think I am improving and I love this Regia wool but I am still seriously slow on four needles. Anyone who knows the secret of avoiding the "ladder" effect when you move from one needle to the other, please let me know! I was so fed up with my first attempt at this sock that I pulled back what I had done, perhaps twice as much as this, and started again. I spent some time trawling the internet for sock knitting tips and am trying the "give a little tug at the second stitch of the new row" suggestion. If you know better, tell me please!

Because this is clearly a long term project, I thought I would have a quick diversion to do something satisfyingly speedy. I bought Melanie Falick's "Weekend Knitting" at Waterstones in Chester, a really gorgeous book that is full of things that make you feel like having a go.

These fingerless gloves are from her book and are the simplest, fastest thing you can imagine, all made in knit stitch, you don't even need to know how to purl, and each glove is easy for even a slow knitter like me to do in a single evening. Mmmm, they say you can tell someone's age from their hands you know. Let's move on...

I like to have a couple of projects on the go simultaneously: the mindlessly easy one which you can do when you are chatting or watching television and the need to concentrate one which requires your full attention and which is, I am sure, some form of meditation. The socks are the concentrating one, for me anyway. This crocheted blanket is the mindless one. This makes it look a good deal more done than it is because I have as usual bitten off more than I can chew. This is meant to be a blanket for a kingsized bed so these two stripes will be about a third of the finished blanket, so while it might be easy it is another long term project! I started this last year when my father in law was in hospital. We seemed to spend a lot of time sitting by his bed and the early stages of the blanket were both portable and soothing to do. The balance between the mindless and the complex has to be watched. Sometimes I might do some of both in one evening. Do too much of the mindless and it becomes simply boring. Do only the complicated and slow, and the inching snail like progress begins to get me down. Butterfly mind.

So close the door, light the fire, pull the chair close. The garden has had its turn for this year.

Does your skin seem older?

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 21:54:00 +0000

I had settled down to watch Grand Designs on Channel 4. It was just the kind of build I love - eco-friendly, with a small budget, and passionate and principled builders getting their own hands dirty, not a "£2m throw money at it and produce an identikit piece of modernism" build. Ian was watching with me. I had a glass of wine in my hand and a fire going in the woodburner. Perfect.

Then the commercial break. A young and beautiful woman was being used to sell skincare products to women at least ten years older. So far, so normal. I can't remember the name of the magic moisturiser which was being promoted, which I must say seems both ironic and pleasing, but suddenly a line in the advertising pap leapt out at me "Der der der der der der der .... skin seems older..... der der der" with the exhortation to use whatsit and improve things.

"Skin seems older"? Well hang on, if you wake up one morning and "skin seems older" that's because it is. With every day, with every minute, with every breath, we are getting older. We are all of us on the same trajectory, from birth to death, slowly or quickly and we are all responsible for how we use the time in between. But whatever we do with our life, it passes. Your skin doesn't "seem" older from one week or month to the next, it is.

That weaselly little word "seems" set me off on one of my rare rants. We age, we die. Face it, understand it, as much as anyone can. We are all getting older. Our society puts such a premium on youth, while demonising children and young people in the next breath. Everywhere the young, slim and beautiful are used to sell things to us and the pressure on us all to look good is phenomenal. Even for the young, there is the pressure to be slim and beautiful and teenage girls undertake a grooming regime which needs the energy and commitment of a full time job. But for anyone over about thirty five there is on top of that a huge pressure to look young. Particularly for women but for men too, there is a whole industry devoted to persuading us that we must be line free, slim waisted, with glossy hair without a thread of grey. The plastic surgery business is booming to the extent that we may soon forget what a face looks like at fifty three, not like Madonna's, that's for sure. And not like Liz Jones's, who seems to have gone through the pain of surgery to look strange but not young.

Don't get me wrong. I like to look good. I dye my hair. I don't think it would be grey if I didn't but I am not really sure what colour it would be if you left it to its own devices. I have liked being blond since I was eighteen and don't intend to stop just yet. I wear mascara. I try to prevent my appetite for good food and good wine getting totally out of hand. But I don't look like my daughters and I don't want to. When Facebook throws the adverts at me about 52 year olds looking 34, I neither believe it nor care.

We are all caught up in an act of massive self delusion. If we spend enough, groom enough, moisturise enough, exercise enough, have enough plastic surgery we will surely not grow old. And on the same day we hear on the news about old people in hospital uncared for, unable to feed themselves, meals left to go cold while nurses sit in front of computers. We don't want to engage with the old. They remind us that we will be them one day. They challenge the delusion that we can be young for ever is only we try hard enough.

Skin doesn't seem older from day to day. It is. That's the way life works. I think we live life better if we grasp, however imperfectly, that we are moving through it, getting older. That's just the way it is.

Miscellany

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:26:00 +0000

The dog went home and I raised my head from the world of dogfood, chewsticks and the downstay. The cat came in again, somewhat crossly, and made its displeasure at its exile clear by sleeping in my chair instead of on the sofa.

At the beginning of the week the garden was glowing in summer heat. Even the roses were throwing a last glorious party. By the end of it, the temperature had dropped ten degrees and the wind had flattened the cosmos, still flowering their hearts out in the cutting garden.

Inside the stripy little Welsummer chicks were beginning to show their first true feathers.

As the dog's owner returned, I disappeared off for a weekend with elder daughter, son in law and nearly two year old grandson. Grandson makes me laugh all the time. He is obsessed with cars and trains and all kind of vehicles and rides everywhere on his little trike, beeping slowly and carefully every time he goes backwards to show that he is reversing.

He plays with total concentration and finds the world amazingly sunny and amusing.

And more progress in the kitchen when I get home. I might just do a little jig when it is all done.

Dogs, cats and the whole darn thing

noreply@blogger.com (elizabethm) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:21:00 +0000

I offer you five things to think about if you are considering offering to look after your daughter's young dog for the week.

Is the dog still inclined to jump up at people from time to time?
Do you have a just about to be ninety three year old living with you who is not too steady on his feet?

Is your beautiful ginger cat inclined to turn into a spitting, shrieking, dog seeking missile?
Do you have a large number of chickens?
Is your husband someone who tolerates said dog and cat rather than a full blown animal lover? Actually this last one is the best bit so far as husband is engaging fully and productively with the whole dog, grandpa, cat etc dilemma.

Of course I thought about these things, of course I did. I am a forward planning type of person. The dog is asleep at my feet. The cat is miaowing crossly on the doorstep. Father in law is watching the televsion in his room. The chickens are shut up in their runs.

It's all fine.

My God, is it really only quarter past five?