Tag: Garden

Holly and Ivy

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Two beautiful winter friends, Holly is more dramatic, with a spiky personality. She has red lips and a sharp smile. Ivy is more introverted, a clinging persona who hides hidden depths. Ivy will climb up the social ladder and suppress her rivals.

Outdoor types, the girls are often seen around town together, usually in the winter months, and at the mid winter festival where they team up with pale mistletoe who hangs around with them trying to suck up to them.

Often seen at Christmas parties together it is always Holly that gets her claws into the office staff. Never one to miss some fun, Ivy likes to trail around town with Holly.

Meanwhile the baby narcissii and crocuses sleep in their beds waiting for warmer weather

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Bringing the houseplants in

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Our houseplants have always sat on the kitchen window sill but they had to be unceremoniously chucked out while we had the kitchen and bathroom replaced. Some of the plants had been here since we moved in about 24 years ago. They were old, battered, pot bound, but they had survived. Anyway the upshot was they all sat outside in the hot summer sun and got watered when the other plants outside were fed and watered. They were all close to the house with lots of plants surrounding them so they were sheltered.

It’s getting cold finally this autumn  The forecast is for cold weather and winds from tomorrow. The other garden plants are fading so it was time to get them back in.

What we found were plants that had outgrown their pots, or ones where part of the plant had crisped and died, but the other side was covered in new growth. So they are all back inside now. Tucked into new pots, with found objects as trays underneath to stop water leaking onto the window ledge. I’ve used a couple of old teacups for the Christmas cactuses that Richard bought a few weeks ago. They are already in flower.

So we have a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom full of plants ….. They might go outside again next year.

 

The leaf travels

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One tiny leaf caught up by the wind and deposited on my windscreen. One leaf so thin you can see the tiny holes (stomata) that allows gas to pass into the leaf so that photosynthesis can take place and water vapour can transpire away from the leaf. Each leaf attached to a twig, branch and limb of a tree perhaps? Once I saw a programme where they cut a tree in half, lifted the top of it up and slid a large bucket of water into the gap then lowered the tree into it. Rather like cut flowers in a vase. Then they watched as breezes sucked fluid out of the bucket, up through the network of phloem or xylem (I can never remember which) and out through the crown of the tree through the leaves. There were gallons of liquid moving through the tree. Then at the end of the summer the tree or plant starts to shut down. Nutrients and leaf colour are sucked back into the tree to be stored till spring. This is why some trees such as Walnuts should not be pruned until winter. They suck up so much fluid they seem to bleed sap if you cut them. Only in winter does the flow reduce enough to make it safe to cut the tree back.

But what about this tiny leaf on my screen? There then gone, washed away by a sharp shower of rain, into some gutter or drain. But it got me thinking before it disappeared, how a small thing can make a large thing work, how being part of a team can make things work.

Pears

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A couple of weeks after our small crop of apples the pears have almost all fallen off the tree following a strong breeze. There are two left up on the tree.

As with all windfalls they are a bit battered and bruised.  We had a few earlier and I think birds have been trying to eat them too, but pears stay hard for ages then suddenly ripen so they are not soft enough for the blackbirds and robins in the garden.

What to do with them? I’m going to chop off the bad bits then poach them in white wine when they are a bit riper . I dont think they will be beautiful pears standing up right in their bowls, but a bit more of a chopped up chunky pudding, with added custard. I might take photos!

Why is the tree at an angle?  I don’t know, we put it in and it  grew this way. This year we put an old shelf upright underneath it to support it as it was tipping further. As it grows large fruit, they seem to pull on the top half. Hopefully it won’t snap. It was bought as a sapling from an old Woolworth store. It must have been planted 20 years ago and since its matured it’s always borne fruit.

Hooray for the old pear tree. Faithfull fruiter!

Smell the flowers

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Poppy time is my favourite time of the summer. First the buds swell, then split. Papery petals unfurl and stretch. Like butterfly wings emerging from its chrysalis.

Poppies are my favourite flowers, to see their cheery heads waving in the breeze in a cornfield, or along the grass verges of motorways. Their lovely flowers help feed the bees, and their pepper pot seed heads spread thousands of seeds everywhere. I love breaking the dried seed heads off and scattering the tiny grains of seed all around the garden. They don’t always grow where they are sown, but like disturbed ground and can lie dormant in the soil, which is why they can appear on building sites and why they bloomed in Flanders fields.

Poignant reminded of war. Pretty flower, or even narcotic. Poppies have power.

Fruit

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Oh to be a happy pear,

Sitting on an old blue stair.

Or an apple with a smile,

Laughing and joking all the while.

What a jape

To be a grape.

And even when the sun don’t shine,

Have a drink with lots of lime.

Maybe even eat a lemon

And then again a small persimmon.

But never ever be an orange,

Cause there’s no rhyme to go with it!

Thistle do?

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Thistle, old flower,

Magenta and green,

Sharp and green,

Sparkling with spikes,

Shunning the soft,

Not needing likes,

But waiting to shed

Your seeds all around,

Soft thistledown

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Work in progress on a painting of a thistle against old brickwork. It’s good how life can spring from cracks in the pavement or up from old guttering. The world tries to take over for our concrete and brick….

Thistles do remind me of punk and spikey hairdos!

Older paintings

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Some paintings I did are at my relatives house so I don’t see them very often. The painting I did of Jupiter is there. I do think it looks a bit “knitted”. I would love to do some paintings based on the latest images. I think that it would be very difficult to accurately copy the atmosphere of Jupiter.  Saturn’s rings would be equally difficult to render.

The other paintings are: a picure of our garden before it got madly overgrown. Two paintings of Bovisand, out over Plymouth sound and looking inland at the geology of the rocks. My husband standing under an old arch on the isle of Portland. A watercolour of a place called Jennycliff, which is on the south east side of Plymouth.

And finally a snow scene that I painted in the 1980’s. It was meant to represent the steppes and has Russian style onion domes in the background. I’m not sure where I got my idea from. I was reading Frank Herberts “Dune” trilogy at the time and I had never seen an image of the steppes…. But to me that’s part of what being an artist is about, pictures in your mind that you are trying to represent.

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Hanging baskets

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This was my garden…….in 2017….20170831_153616

This was my back yard last year. Everything was lush and green with lots of colour. This year things are not as good, some plants are wilting in the heat, others have only just survived. I haven’t taken photos of them because its all a bit messy. Still I will persevere. We might be getting some rain on Sunday if we are lucky.

There may be some thunderstorms east of us but nothing due here. It’s so strange, we are a wet country usually. We are normally known for complaining about cold wet summers, and grey dismal winters.

Climate change? I don’t know. But something is going on.

Multiply up all the gardens in the country where the plants are struggling. Then think of all the farms that are having trouble, having to feed hay and winter food stocks to there animals because there is not enough grass for them. It’s not normal. While over in Europe temperatures have risen above 40°C.

But we are lucky in comparison with other parts of the world. Terrible floods, droughts. The world’s temperature has risen since the turn of the millennium.

We are worried by plastic in the oceans, maybe we should really worry about the climate before its too late. Climate scientists have reported that the weather could actually become so hot that we end up in a “hot house Earth” scenario.

If not for our generation, but for future ones we need to stop listening to business people whose interest is short term gain and move to a more balanced, less greedy world. If that means that rich western countries should share technology with the whole world then that’s what we should do. Rant for the day over. ..

Last year

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Last year the garden was lovely, full of flowers. This ceramic head I made 20 years or so ago was full of nasturtiums and lobelia. It sits on the wall by the back door, its glazed in st Nicholas glaze if I remember rightly. Greeny grey in colour. It was hand built with a flat back and I used wet hand towels to support the face while it was drying out ready for firing.

The space inside it is not very big, so plants that can survive drought conditions are best planted in it.

We are getting our hanging baskets this week and I will try and plant some pots up with begonias, pelagoniums, bizzie lizzies and fuschias to cheer the walls around them up.

I would like to do some more pottery heads, maybe green men masks to make the yard more interesting.

Meanwhile in the main garden the trees are getting out of control. We had some work done earlier in the year but the remaining trees and shrubs have gone rampant because they now have more light.

Still if it works and we get more birds like a chaffinch and a couple of robins, plus nesting blue tits who’s chicks have now fledged , I guess I don’t mind too much!