Friday 23 February 2024

WAITING



As the years pass I think I look more like my father, then this morning I looked up from the sink in the bathroom at the mirror, at my reflection, and thought no, I look more like Sloth out of The Goonies!

It rains and rains. There is really nothing I can do much in the garden as it is so wet. There are big bags of slate clippings waiting to go on the paths and another of topsoil. They are waiting for the gardener to shift them. The mower is waiting to be serviced. The broken branches are waiting to be cleared. The gateman has started on mending the electric gate but waiting for that to be finished which it has been at last.

We do have first daffodils and the pulmonaria is flowering, but no camellias yet. There are many other flowers out.

The birds are consuming a whole feeder full of sunflower seed every day. 

Finally we have a day with a little sunshine. I investigate the whereabouts of our rabbit hole. Two fat bunnies feeding on the banking this morning. Found only one burrow but I bet they have a back door.

This afternoon we are beset by a loony bluetit tapping on the tall Westmorland window by the stairs. Presumably having a go at its own image.

And just when we think there is spring in the air it is Jane Morgan weather again (1958).

We will have floods and unlike the song Mother Earth’s arms are already saturated.

So a better morning, a blackbird singing and a greater spotted woodpecker hammering on one of our trees.

There is colour from the shrubs - quince, skimmia, clematis armandii, hazel and the stems on the maple.













The moss is lush with the mild damp weather and the parsley still thrives.  And the snowdrops still carpet the wood.


I shall pick up sticks I say but get a shovel full of disapproval. Someone wants the garden to be spick and span not ignored and wild and messy and I am getting to creaky to do it. No names mentioned but the asparagus bed looks a lot better now.

The heron comes but only when the trail camera is elsewhere so all I have are hen pheasants and a grey squirrel.




Thursday 8 February 2024

THE WINTER GOES ON AND ON

 Oh-oh-oh-oh and it comes out here.

There are moments when one holds one’s breath - R said to look out of the kitchen doors and there, in the rosemary bush ten feet away were five long-tailed tits. So I sit with my turmeric and ginger drink and listen to the one note samba from the sparrows outside the window. I presume they are getting ready to build a nest in the bathroom vent again. Yesterday we had a wheeling of rooks from the tall trees - a buzzard up there setting them off.

Went for a walk near Bouth in Grubbins Wood and the footpaths were almost impassible with fallen trees an swollen streams. The moss was splendid and flooding in the lower fields by the Rusland Pool.

And now the moorhen’s back, heyla, heyla, the moorhen’s back. 

Fox in the night on the camera.


A breather Wednesday before the weather goes downhill. Sleet and rain forecast. So in garden and tidying a bit, removing dead stuff and trimming low branches - the ones I always catch my head on.

We are replacing the mechanism on the electric gate at great expense but it is seventeen years old. 

The sixth of February was the 56th anniversary of the first time I took R out! Where have all the years gone?

We have our first primrose and cyclamen flowering by the log pile. Both hellebores in bloom and when (when!) the sun comes out it highlights there cherry bark.

So now Thursday and it started sleeting, then snowing, then a gale got up and it is raining and cold 2C.

 


Think I will stay in this afternoon.

This is my 959th blog - time to retire soon?

Wednesday 31 January 2024

ISHA ISHA

 All fall down. What a name for a storm, and now Jocelyn. I mean perhaps Ruarri, or something?

Floods and wind, the electric gate needs replacing, and now I have hearings aids I can hear every zephyr. 


Even the Berberis from Cally gardens has gone lopsided.

R has been clearing up the flower beds and I have raked out the debris from the stream so now, hopefully, it will not spread across the garden, so soggy. 

J has been round and will give me a quote for tidying up the broken branches. D has been and told us we need a new gate motor. I have been to the doc only it was the wrong day so I came home.

I have put all the scruffy amaryllis into one big pot with compost and some pelleted hen manure. I have found a couple of rabbit holes hidden away by the top fence but they are hard to get at for one who tends to fall over a lot.

And the wind has reached 150mph in The Faroes, raining again, though the heron was back on the pond and I saw a treecreeper ascending the big cherry tree.

The Amaryllis we got at Christmas is looking splendid.

The gardener did not come today and I do not blame him. It is dark and the rain is spattering on my window.

However we do have our first daffodil buds and the snowdrops are great - this is really due to R diligently spreading them. (This is my main gardener and she comes free(ish).




We do have colour here and there like the quince and the viburnum.




So now nearly February and where has the time gone? (Probably asleep or reading a book?)

Our bench is on its back again.

There are floods in the low fields.

All in all things can only get better.

Can't they??

Should I write to the King and ask him how the op was?



Sunday 14 January 2024

2024 AND TREES

 So here we are in 2024 and it is still raining, floods in the fields and squelch across the garden. At least we have survived the festive season, just.

I have just found how difficult it is to type accurately when having the hiccoughs, am stil findin it ard.

The garden is best left alone at the moment perhaps to avoid damage - when it is so wet.

So a bit on trees, big trees. These I photographed on our last visit to Holker Hall, big trees are amazing things.

 


There is something about trees, especially the trunks, that is majestic.

The big ones are all older than I can ever be and much more attractive than I could be as a skeleton - the spread of branches, the strength of the trunk.

I look at the wrecked garden and decide to stay in the house. Where it is warm. If the oil man ever delivers.

So the last year sprawls into the new, what was going on is still going on - very depressing.

Then it is twelfth night, well day, and the decorations are down - AND the sun is shining - and it is not raining.

We went to the garden centre in Beetham today, really for a coffee, but ended up buying a big pot in which to dump all the weedy amaryllis I have around the house, a christmas rose for R and a female skimmia for our lonely male skimmia.


I will really need to get out there and tidy away the debris.

There is still colour on the liquidambar despite broken branches and the viburnum is flowering as is the winter flowering honeysuckle.

And we have one rose flower and the beginnings of rhubarb. It is a month of silhouettes and shapes. Not all the world is asleep - the moles are hard at work messing the lawn.

Then there are the stirring snowdrops bringing hope in the dark days.


The sun shines and lifts then whole mood of the garden even though we are in frosty weather.


When we were in lockdown with the Covid the blue sky was untarnished by contrails - alas no longer - 


Roll on spring.

Friday 22 December 2023

I’M DREAMING OF

 A dry Christmas, with no rain or snow or hail - actually no rain would be good.


So Happy Christmas to all those in more balmy (barmy?) climes from Welly boot land.

I have been rash and bought a small chainsaw for pruning and dealing with all the fallen wood after the snow. Unlike the banks we have lots of branches on the ground. So the stream is unblocked but the grass is so wet water runs across it and I have to paddle and squelch. The gardener wisely has stayed away. (It is raining again.)

The twenty first is the shortest day (hurrah!) so I can only get longer in the tooth from now on.

And then storm Pia came along and blew and soaked us all.


All around then garden are remnants of the summer that need clearing away -


But the weather is so unkind. I has planted grasses after seeing them covered in frost and looking beautiful in magazines but now they will have to be cut back and removed. And R and I have had some sort of cold - she coughed and I ached. No I do not know if it is Covid as our testing kit is out of date and why bother anyway. As it becomes gloomy outside the sky turns, not red, but a pale purplish grey like a bruise. And in then background is the roar of the wind.
So happy Christmas and New Year!

But there are signs of hope, snowdrops through, daffodils too and buds on the camellias.




And the winter flowering viburnum bodnantiense is well out.


And every day there is four o’clock again and again, and it is dark, no moon, no stars just cloud, and rain.


FOUR O’CLOCK 


It's four o'clock, whatever I say,  

it's four o'clock again,

a dark and drab December day,

and it's just begun to rain.

The sky is filled with dismal grey

we’re short of sun again.

Time is ever set at four

this year’s gone down the drain,

And its miserable outside the door,

its four o’clock again.

Winter - always four o'clock,

as the afternoon light falls,

I would go outside. unblock

the beck but can’t be arsed at all.

I shall makes some tea

For R and me, have a piece of cake,

take a break from the dreary rain,

Oh! It’s four o'clock again.


But the tree is up and decorated, we have bankrupted ourselves in the supermarket so for ten days Scrooge will have to go on the back burner and wait.