For mr bungalow bill, because he asked for photos of the garden.
April has been dry and cold, with just a few sunny days, here in the north of north. But the garden is bursting with life within its two hundred year old walls, the birds are getting smoochy, the days are getting longer.
Here you go:
Never fruited, just a wonder that it lives here, clinging to the sunny wall.
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| apple blossom |
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| the daffodil meadow, with the orchard in the distance |
There's more than a thousand daffodil bulbs in that meadow - I know, I planted them myself
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| tulips and bluebells |
This wall is getting on for 8 foot high, enclosing the former kitchen garden for the manse. Too expensive to build such a dry-stone dyke now, but 220 years ago, it was a different matter.
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| tulips in the yellow border |
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| bluebells and dandelions around an urn in the walled kitchen garden |
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So that's lots of spring stuff - now I've sorted out how to post the photos the right way up, I'll put up some photos of the trees when they are in leaf. - mrs ishmael
8 comments:
That's fabulous thanks, Mrs I, and particularly uplifting now. A serious tonic.
A pleasure and a privilege, mr bb. I had to get some help with the rotating photographs - but, got there in the end.
Very nice daffs, Mrs I. I don't think we have daffs down under (possibly in the more temperate areas like Tasmania, I'm not sure) but I'm looking out of my window at bird of paradise flowers in bloom even as we go into winter, and its bloody cold this morning (14 centigrade).
mr mike, Bird of paradise flowers look hardly real to our northern eyes, tropical, flaunting things. So beautiful. The definition of bloody cold is entirely relative, of course. 14 C would be warm here - this morning, the 1st of May, it is 8 C, cloud cover and rain expected.
It has been cold here too, mrs i. I have had to light the fire these last two evenings.
A thousand daff bulbs is a lot. The tree rats used to dig ours up as fast as we'd put them in the ground but eventually we overwhelmed them.
We have no squirrels here, mr mongoose, but lots of ordinary rats instead. Here's a story for you: you know how, in the centre of our walled kitchen garden, there's a statue of a female wearing very little in an insouciant sort of way, obviously doesna feel the cold? About 12 years ago, I planned this tulip extravaganza, with masses of tulips in graded waves of colour flowing out from the central stone girl down the two side borders to her left and right. Closest to the statue, were white tulips, then blazing yellow, shading to orange, red then Queen of the Night Black. A lot of tulips, a lot of work, but I got them all in over a couple of days, really proud of myself. A while later, I weeded out another border, and took the weeds to one of the composters, a conical green plastic affair, with a lid and a hatch at the bottom for the removal of perfectly decomposed compost. A bit optimistic, that, because it was not efficient, there just wasn't any of that fine, black, crumbling loam. So I take the lid off the composter, and there are the tulip bulbs. Piles and piles of them sitting on top of the grass and stuff. I seriously doubted myself. I knew I had planted them, and yet, there they were. Had I just thrown them all away because the planting was too hard, and then erased that memory, replacing it with one of me diligently and industriously planting bulbs? Had I strayed into a parallel universe? Belief structures toppling, I called mr ishmael to explain to me What Was Going On. He noticed what I had overlooked - lots of teeth marks on the bulbs. They had worked harder than I had, the little chaps. They had dug up each bulb by stealth by night, feasted, then decided to store away everything they couldn't manage in the compost bin. Ideal pantry for them. Drag the bulbs across the garden, enter through the ground level hatch, burrow upwards through the compost, then lay out the bulbs for winter feasting. They didn't realise that the lid came off and their stores would be revealed.
Life in its chronic pattern, eh, mr mongoose?
Rodents, eh? Clever chaps.
I envy you your sea, mrs i, but at least we have a river. The whole length of the garden is bordered by a brook draining the rainwater from the town down into the river 20m away. The bank of this brook - sometimes a proper torrent when it chucks it down - is teeming with rodent chaps. One day one of the cats brought in a suspiciously large mouse, with a suspiciously long tail, and then let the bugger go in the sitting room. As they do. The obvious panto ensued. Cats, rodent, daughters flying about the place. A full "Carry On Screaming" and let's all stand on the chairs party. The beast escaped behind the bookcase and could be heard for a while thumping about. "Are you sure that's a mouse, daddy?", asked one of the then mini-mongoslings. "Oh, yes. That's his winter coat making him look so big." (Or doubtless some such fatherly lie.)
I dealt with it when they had all gone to bed, including their mother. "Are you staying up?" "Just for a while. Got a couple of things to do yet." I chased him out with a stick and he was caught and swiftly dispatched by the senior moggie, who looked at the other one (possibly two) as if he was a useless basatrd. The body was taken away, probably to the secret rodent consumption parlour behind the freezer.
A proper riverside rat. The bloody thing was as big as ten mice.!
Well your lucky Mr mongoose with just a big mouse. We have altogether different kinds of wildlife down here. The kind that wants to kill you. I was once cleaning out leaves from my pool and got bitten by something on the hand. The most painful thing I've experienced. My hand went numb and the numbness went up the arm. I thought about ringing for an ambulance, but decided not. I felt it was better to die than suffer endless "I told you so" from my wife (who was out shopping). Fortunately it stopped at the shoulder. Probably a spider. We have, uniquely, the Sydney Funnel Web spider. Little bugger but aggressive, and can kill in 15 mins. Always shake your shoes out in the morning.
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