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Birth Announcement Card
The fairly regular substantial showers of heavy rain that we are experiencing this week has really freshened the garden and perked up flagging flowers such as Japanese anemones which are somewhat stunted; solanums both blue and white like this one that cascades over a tall dead elm; various dahlias had been dried up and hanging […]
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A Walk Round The Garden
After a lengthy session of dead-heading, incidental weeding, trips to the compost bins, and a sit down this morning I wandered around the garden with my camera. As usual these images are all titled in the gallery. This afternoon we attended a family gathering at Elizabeth’s with Jacqueline, Joseph, Angela, Danni, Andy, and Ella, with […]
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From One Scent To Another
The usual division of labour applied to garden maintenance this searingly hot day, although Flo had worked until it was too long after dark to see, finishing the last of the compost and plants; and filling our score of watering cans. As soon as I had prised my nostrils from the scented rose bushes, had […]
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Flies Are Now In Season
On another warm, humid, and largely overcast morning garden maintenance was continued. Jackie mostly concentrated on the Rose Garden, then produced her own gallery. It was the cricket on Absolutely Fabulous that sent her indoors for her camera. She also spotted a bee and a beetle on Rosa Gallica. Winchester Cathedral, For Your Eyes Only, […]
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Benches
I have now read two more of The Folio Society’s 1974 selection of Short Stories by Anton Chekhov. The first, which is not illustrated with a drawing by Nigel Lambourne, is ‘The Cross of Anna’. As Elisaveta Fen, the translator, writes ‘It is essentially a story of the destruction of innocence and the folly of […]
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A Negative Tattoo
The day dawned dull yet dry; the air cool and cheerless. Nevertheless Compassion rose, its neighbouring geranium palmatum; rose Penny Lane and her accompanying clematis Dr Ruppel flourished well enough as I made my way into the garden to gather up clippings from the Head Gardener’s morning graft. After lunch I carried out an extensive […]
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At The Tea Interval
On a drab, drearily dull, day I tuned into the start of the second cricket Test Match between England and New Zealand, and scanned eight more of Charles Keeping’s excellent illustrations to Charles Dickens’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby’. In turning ‘Nicholas found Bray lying on the floor quite dead, and his daughter clinging to the body’ upside […]
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Guns ‘N’ Roses
From our bedroom window we are still greeted in the morning by a scented pink climbing rose, sweet little solanum, and ripe crab apples so far eschewed by blackbirds; and from our en suite bathroom Paul’s Scarlet still soaring above the wisteria. While I up there taking these images I made several garden view photographs, […]
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They Keep On Coming
The moon was out of bed this morning when Jackie took her camera into the garden, yet cloud cover soon rolled in. She crouched low to offer the Cobaea Scandens cup to the lingering orb. Fennel seeds, sweet pea pods, and mahonia completed the collection of silhouettes. The Assistant Photographer finished with pastel shades of […]
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Current Condition
Between further bouts of dis-tressing Félicité Perpétue I checked on the current condition of the rest of the garden. In the meantime Jackie continued her weeding and clearing, leaving offerings for me to transport to the compost bin. This climbing Cobaea Scandens, or Cup and Saucer plant is now blooming on the kitchen wall near […]