Skip to main content

Gardening Time!

A glorious afternoon tempted me into the front garden, hedge strimmer in hand.  Ours hadn't been pruned since mid-autumn, so it was looking straggly. 

When I get a Round Tuit, I want to redesign the front garden.  There are a few camelias - my favourite white one's coming into bloom now - and a lovely white rose that I want to keep, but the shrubs and "ivy cascade" (ie. tangled mound with tentacles) can go.  As things stand, it looks like the design didn't turn out quite according to plan - which is an accurate assessment.  It was supposed to be easy-care but everything grew like crazy and took over, but not in an interesting way.  In the back garden, in the Grove, everything went wild too but that looks and feels wonderful, but then this fits the context.

One of the things I plan to install is a pond, as we get quite a lot of amphibians here.  Putting a pond in the back garden would invite disaster as Ygraine loves paddling, and her favourite way of getting dry again is to rolly-polly madly all over the furniture, leaving behind a trail of soggy fur and a distinctive damp-dog fragrance.  She's eleven years old now but still loves swimming.  Emily, our other dog, absolutely hates it.  Emily will dip in a toe and that's her lot.

Share   Subscribe
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Cure for Aging?

"All that we profess to do is but this, - to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effort of time.  This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood.  In our order we hold most noble -, first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body.  But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or calorific, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpectual renovator...." Zanoni, book IV, chapter II, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1842. Oroboros keyring - Spooky Cute Designs The idea of being able to achieve an immortal life is probably as old as human life itself.  Folklore and myt...
15 comments
Read more

Remembering Richie Tattoo Artist's Studio

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist".  I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dear Diary...

Do you keep a diary? Why did you start it, and, if you started one then stopped, why was that? What sort of things do (or did) you write about? I ask as, as a long-time diarist myself, there is an interesting piece in The Guardian today which talks about one woman's diary habit, which she began at the age of fourteen. I started a diary around that age too, but destroyed it after my mother accused me of using cocaine.  A stern scene followed, with both parents perched ram-rod straight in their armchairs, while I was subjected to a heated inquisition. Where had I bought it, and who from? Didn't I know such things led to death and doom? I struggled to decipher their bewildering accusations, until Mum blurted out, "I read it in your diary!" To find my diary, Mum would first have had to rummage through my dressing table, obviously when I wasn't around to protest. Her intrusion on my privacy was assumed by both parents to be acceptable, and now, with this handwritten c...
Post a Comment
Read more