Valentines Flowers

I was totally knocked off my feet by the enormous bouquet of flowers I received for Valentines Day. My boyfriend is not known for showing his romantic side and he positively winces when I shower him with kisses (but secretly I think he likes it!).

I took a walk up the garden path yesterday. Nothing much going on but I think it's the calm before the storm. I have so much work to do in the garden this year, it's quite daunting.

So for now I will just sit back and smell my flowers, until the weather warms up a bit and then the back ache and dirty fingers nails begin in earnest!

I put these flowers from the bouquet into a separate vase. I have a lovely old vase which I picked up from a charity shop, which has a maroon base and is quite unusual. The pink carnations and pink broom which has a sweet smelling perfume, just needed their own stage.

Shopping for Seeds and Raiding the Archives

If this was a blog about my life, I would tell you about my discovery of Fleet Foxes and how their album is absolutely beautiful. I would tell you about how my boyfriend has nearly finished our new bathroom and how I have had to summon up all my patience, telling myself that I will be worth the wait. I would tell you about my successes at baking. (Andy is very good at cooking cakes and we are always in competition to see whose is the best) and I would tell you about my disappointment that HFW is charging £110 per ticket for the annual River Cottage members evening (hence we won't be going!) but I won't because this blog is about my garden and my photography. But if it was about my life, then I wouldn't have left it so long between postings as my gardening pursuits have only extended to looking out of the kitchen window.

I have stayed firmly indoors this January, apart from leaving the house for essentials, work and shopping for instance and I am pleased that we have now left that month behind. I don't do Winter very well and I have been feeling a tad 'down in the dumps' these past few weeks but with the promise of lighter evenings, my heart feels a little lighter today

I did venture out and took a turn around the garden once, only to find a plant which I had put in my summer house to protect from the frost had copped it. It was a succulent which I had bought on my trip to Trebah gardens in Cornwall, early last year. I wonder how my dahlia tubers will fare under their blanket of compost? This Winter has been considerably colder; the upside being that bugs and pests which have been surviving in our warmer Winters of late may have also gone the way of my Aeonium arboreum 'Atropurpureum'

Although I haven't done any physical gardening, I have been shopping on the Internet and made the most of Thompson & Morgans offer of free p & p. I ordered my potatoes for chitting. I chose Charlotte again as they were easy to grow and very yummy. I ordered garlic, which I am going to start off in modules in the summer house. I hope this will give them a better chance, away from the Winter wet. I am going to try more legumes this year. I ordered, Runner Bean 'Painted Lady' and Pea 'Hurst Green Shaft', and I am trying Parsnips this year for the first time and of course Carrots 'Adelaide F1 Hybrid. That's it for veg for now, so it will be onto ordering salads and tomatoes and I will be trying cucumber as well this year.

On the photography front, I read last weekend that an Austrian artist is saving Polaroid film from extinction. To celebrate, I reached for my Polaroid camera, from the shelf and promptly photographed my daughter with the remains of a bowl of melted chocolate, leftovers from the cupcakes I had just adorned. She was amazed that I had just fired off a Polaroid as I had been saving them for 'special' photographs only - an explanation ensued! (Not that she isn't special enough!)

In the absence of any new garden photography, I have raided the archives and found some images which I had scanned onto disc. These black and white photographs were made long before digital photography was even heard of. I photographed the plants on good old Ilford film and after developing the film, I took watercolour paper and painted it with silver gelatin (This had to be done in the dark, without using the red safety light ) After a couple of coats the paper was ready for the enlarger. Various exposures on test strips later, the paper could be exposed for the correct amount of time and then into the 3 baths and then a 4th holding a super fixer. The paper was then washed to get rid of the chemicals and you can see from the photograph of the closed sunflower, that not all the chemicals were washed off properly.

I showed these photographs to Val Williams, many years ago ( she was the curator at the

Hassleblad museum in Germany) and she liked them and said I should sell these to galleries. Sadly I didn't pursue this and now you can do this all in photoshop; it's no longer an art form.

I sometimes feel that photographers today have it oh so easy. It's just a matter of pressing a button. But do you really learn anything that way? The hours spent in the dark room, perfecting that one print has gone now. You certainly learnt by your mistakes but I wouldn't have it any other way. I feel quite privileged to be part of the 'old school' but equally love this new technology. The best of both worlds!

Grasses

Arum Lily

Echinacea
Sunflower

Happy Gardening New Year!

We have turned a corner - the light is coming back to the northern hemisphere.

I celebrate the Winter Solstice. It's a really special time for me. It's a chance to think about the year that's been and to think about the coming year and especially to think about the earth and how by all working together, in our own small way, we can make a collective difference.

Solstice Alter

The garden is quite bare at the moment. Well on the surface anyway, apart from a few brave plants. My Skimmia which I cut a piece of and bought indoors is looking lovely, adorned by ruby red berries and I have a plant which has been in flower pretty much all year long and is still going strong. I have no idea what it is with its orangey-yellow flower but seems to survive as it is planted against a south facing wall.

I am now planning for the new season of gardening. I bought myself Carol Kleins new book Cook Your Own Veg which is full of wonderful recipes and the most beautiful photographs taken by Howard Sooley. Howard Sooley was a great friend of the late Derek Jarman. He did the photography in Derek's book Derek Jarman's garden, which documents the amazing and beautiful garden which Derek created in the wilds of Dungerness, from its beginnings in 1986 to the last years of his life. I believe that Howard still keeps the wooden house and garden as a memorial to his friend. If I am correct, its somewhere I would love to visit.

I took advantage of Thompson and Morgans offer of free p & p last weekend and ordered my seeds and seed potatoes and garlic. I am going to try planting my garlic in pots and keeping it in the summer house until the spring and planting out then, in the hope that that will give them a fighting chance this year away from the soggy weather.
I have also booked myself and long suffering partner Andy on a day at River Cottage in March entitled Get Growing in Spring. Any excuse to visit River Cottage!

Andy knows of my admiration for the late Geoff Hamilton and so for Christmas bought me his 3 DVD set of Ornamental Kitchen Gardens, Cottage Gardens and Paradise Gardens series. They really are wonderful to watch.

I watched the Christmas edition of Gardeners' World and I have to say that I now heartily endorse Toby Buckland. He really reminds me of Geoff. He and Alyse have a lovely rapour and she is so sweet. I an looking forward to its return in the spring.

It might be really chilly outside but the sun is coming back and the nights will soon be drawing out again - lots to look forward to!

Winter Wreath
Boots snuggled up in his new basket

Pale Autumn Sky

Not much tidying went on in the garden today. We woke up to drizzly rain and gusting winds but by 11 the sun had come out just long enough to rescue the fire pit and empty it of ash and water and put it to bed for the Winter and pick the last of my raspberries before the heavens opened again.

This Autumn there has been some really beautiful light. As I sat at my dining room table today, I noticed how the window framed a lovely image of shrub from next door which appears to have blossom on it with a large expanse of pale blue sky. I went outside to photograph it and within minutes the light was gone.




This weekend I have been very lucky as my lovely sister in-law Mary has bought me membership to River Cottage, for Christmas and my birthday next year. Also I bought Carol Kleins latest book Cook Your Own Veg. With her lovely recipes, I will be inspired to grow more vegetables and perhaps try different vegetables. I must say my butternut squash have been an absolute success. I will defiantly be growing those again next year. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cook-Your-Own-Carol-Klein/dp/1845334078/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227455992&sr=1-2

Gardeners' World is over for another season. I have warmed to Toby and was quite sad when it finished. In my opinion, he is from the same school of gardening as the late Geoff Hamilton, the best presenter GW has ever had. I haven't watched the episode from Carol's garden at Glebe Cottage yet, I have that on my sky box. I am saving that treat for when I need cheering up!

More from Compton Acres

I finally got around to editing the rest of the Compton Acres photographs from last weekend.
I failed to mention, that besides the Italian garden, there is also a Japanese garden, complete with a tea house and pagoda. There are stepping stones to take you across a pond full of gigantic coy carp. I am not keen on big fish, so that freaked me out a little, and I had to be helped across the stepping stones like a small child.

This weekend I plan tidy up the garden and see if there is anything photogenic in the garden, which quite frankly is now looking pretty sorry for itself .

Compton Acres

I abandoned the chores in my garden today for a touch of the Italian with a trip to Compton Acres.
I love images of gardens with Romanesque balustrades, so armed with my Nikon and Polaroid cameras we headed towards the Italian garden. I had visited the garden many years ago with my friend Jo, so I had a vague recollection of this part of the garden. To enter the garden you go through a grotto which was gently lit with tea lights. It was absolutely magical.

This time of year when the leaves are falling from the trees, gardens have a kind of neglected and abandoned feel about them. This garden certainly evoked those feelings of abandonment and I swore a fairy flew past us, through the trees, although my boyfriend said it was a dragonfly. Are dragonflies still about this time of year? I prefer my romantic notions.

Here are a few images of the garden. Time is short today, so I have only edited a few.

I will edit the others and scan in my Polaroids for the next blog. I only took a few Polaroids as they are quite expensive, it certainly makes you think about the image before you press the button, just like in the good old days of film!

Putting The Garden To Bed pt 1

The last of my carrots have been pulled up and discarded as the frost had got to them. But the raspberries are still going strong. Not enough to make another batch of delicious jam
unfortunately but enough for raspberry and apple crumble. The raspberries in the pots haven't done nearly as well as the raspberries in the ground, so I am going find a new home for them this Autumn. My veg beds are bare, now that the Dahlias have been cut back. I have left the tubers in the ground and covered them with a thick blanket of compost, so I am hoping that they will survive. We are only about a mile from Poole harbour, so I think that will keep us a few degrees warmer than inland and away from the hardest frosts which will kill the tubers.




I am starting the big tidy up but it has been a bit wet this weekend to sweep up the leaves.
My Astrantia Major is still looking absolutely lovely and is positively sparkling in this gorgeous Autumn light. I always have a heavy heart when we change the clocks in October. I hate coming home from work in the dark but on the plus side we do have some beautiful defused light around us.

I can't believe there is only one more episode of Gardeners' World this year, especially as Toby is starting to grow on me. I think it is because he has similar ways to Geoff Hamilton but if he says 'tickle the soil' one more time I think I will change my mind. Although he didn't say it this week, so perhaps he has got my vibes.

Talking of the television. I appeared very briefly on River Cottage a couple of weeks ago. I was very excited and proud as I love Hugh but rather alarmed at the state I was in. If I had known I was going to be on television I would have made more of an effort. God I looked old. So Hugh has done me a big favour. No more sweets and naughty cakes and I have ordered a Wii fit . I know that being on screen supposed to add 10 pounds but really 10 years as well!!!