While the gardener was away the chickweed made a bid for world domination in the vegetable beds and secured its empire with an outer defense of 3 foot high nettles. Now this is obviously a tribute to the fertility of my soil but I must confess that after a month of neglect I was probably […]
cottage garden
June Cottage Garden
What a difference a year makes I had planned to write about the cottage garden to accompany the description of the vegetable garden in June when my muse prodded me in the ribs (does anyone else have a grumpy, bossy muse?) and suggested that I might look at the photographs of the garden for May […]
The Optimists Garden
When the start of the year is wet and windy and the croft garden is repeatedly battered by 70-90 mph gales, I should really declare the cottage garden out-of-bounds. A walk round the garden on a cold blustery afternoon in early February is enough to depress even the most optimistic gardener. There are times when […]
The January Garden – Looking Both Ways
Janus Pater, firstborn of Roman deities, presides over all transitions and beginnings, the door keeper, guardian of the new year, and custodian of the calendar, from whom January takes its name. In deference to Janus I am ambivalent about January – the lengthening days tell me to look forward as spring is coming, but the […]
In the Winter Garden
I always dreamed of having a winter garden – delicate snowdrops and aconites in perfect drifts beneath the tracery of the bare branches of elegant Japanese acers and the ghostly stems of birches. A contrasting backdrop of glossy green Mahonia and air laden with the delicate scent of winter jasmine, Osmanthus and Daphne. The reality is a cottage garden […]