Blue hills and a buttermilk sky

Out there in the real world I asked a friend (and loyal reader of the blog) recently if I should get back to blogging and she said yes... Was she was just being nice? Quite possibly, but I took it on face value (thanks lb!).

I'd been thinking about the blog quite a bit over the summer: on the one hand there's been a lot of 'oh I'd love to mention that garden/plant/hillside/fox-sighting in the blog'; but on the other it has been nice just letting myself enjoy the various sights, sounds, sensations without having to record and share. Though if truth be told, I've been sharing it via facebook. It's the lazy woman's way: just select the phone pic and share. And yes, there's an awful lot of sharing going on in here on t'internet, so why add to it by getting back to the blog? Partly because I've enjoyed the diary aspect of it; and the discipline of it was fun when I started: I wanted to prove to myself that I could write weekly and did for two years. It also takes more commitment than pressing 'share' on a phone pic and that's not a bad thing.

But I'd become concerned that the blog was getting too repetitive: I set out to show that a small garden and an interest in nature can provide lots of wonder, and they do. The problem with confining myself to just those is the fear that things become too repetitive (in the garden's case) or they carry the expectation of being too depressing (in the case of writing about nature): loss of biodiversity, pollution, climate change, destruction of our peatlands... all of these things inevitably come to light once you take an interest in the natural world and to ignore those issues as I have seems Pollyanna-ish, but honestly I get exhausted by so much gloom.

Always I've wanted to share some sense of wonder, some sense of exploration. Sometimes the exploration is of nature and gardens, sometimes of place, sometimes of trying out new things such as drawing. So, I'll continue with those but overall, this will be a mixed bag. It is a bit risky: so many blogs seem to be very focused on Just One Thing (gardens or plants or drawing/painting). Those who focus on the one thing are then very good at that thing, so the theory goes, and the readership builds up accordingly. But my mind is a bit like a pondskater on a summer's evening, dashing from one place to the next, not even scratching the surface. I can't stay on just one thing: while I admire the skill and knowledge of those who do, it's not for me. I get entranced by a drawing and then I get pulled into a poem. I am delighted by a piece of music and then I marvel at birdsong. 'Nature' is the common thread to much of it, though not all.

So, if you come along for the ride, I hope you enjoy it, but I can't guarantee it will interest you *all* of the time; I only hope you'll find something some of the time that causes you to pause for thought. Thanks dear readers.

Here's a start then:

Drawing 

by Sarah Simblet, from the New Sylva; you can find more here.

A diary bit

It was cycling through the suburbs only a week or two ago, on my way home from work, that the blog came to the fore yet again. Even in the 'burbs, the surroundings can be delightful: on that evening, the Dublin mountains (hills really) were a gorgeous violet-indigo blue and had a pale buttermilk sky behind as the sun had just set. Ah Autumn!

While enjoying the colours, the contrast, the hills pulling my mind out and away from the traffic, the noise and the fumes, my mind immediately also connected to a song, and I thought the blog would be a nice place to record all that.

Some music

It was of course the buttermilk sky that brought this song into my head, although it was the wonderful Freddie White, not Mr Carmichael, who was singing in my head. While searching for the song, I found this next piece of music which is very different, but lovely too; take some time out (it's just over three minutes) and have a listen while you think of some blue hills you know with a pale sky behind.

The birdsong:

While searching on soundcloud, I found recordings by this man, an Irish cabinetmaker who loves to record birdsong. How serendipitous and great is that? Do you have time to take 10 more minutes out? Immerse yourself in the night song of Thrush Nightingales in Estonia:

The gardens:

After what can most charitably be described as an indifferent summer, we've had a wonderfully mild autumn. The colours are still beautiful; here's how my own patch looked last weekend:

The garden in autumn -- asters, sedums, agapanthus and grasses. Oh, and a photo-bombing Verbena bonariensis...

And a rather more expert gardener looks after this:

Caher Bridge garden in August

Exploring:

We finally got a campervan: old and much loved. We've been gallivanting a bit:

The van in the Wicklow hills. Beautiful autumn weather and the heather in bloom. 

And I've been exploring with ink. Lordie, drawing is hard enough, but with ink, the safety net of the trusty eraser is gone! Scary but fun once I stopped worrying. I just go for it and see what happens, with ballpoint pens, ink, felt-tips, whatever. All part of the #inktober meme. Yes, the internet can be an okay place. 

Spot-the-schnauzer sketches done with metal nibs in ecoline

Nicandra physalodes, also in ecoline, brush and pen

See you here again soon I hope. 

The arty one

Some of you more dedicated readers (bless you) will know that drawing is one of my current interests - as well as gardens, plants, natural history, words. I've been spending the last few months (though only for a few hours a week) getting into some of the basics of drawing, with the help of Sam Horler at The Drawing Studio and the very classical Bargue Cours de Dessin.

I have been enjoying it enormously, which is not to say that there haven't been moments of teeth-grinding frustration... But all in all, the learning has been great and the taking time out to wield a pencil with some sort of serious intent has been very satisfying. It's a real 'in the zone' activity for me, which is wonderful in itself. The results are mixed but my hope is that it will help me draw better the things I love. Time will tell!

So, here's what I've been up to during this time of very traditional and classical training, it's a mixed bag of drawings and some of the things I see in these drawings make me wince a bit on looking at them now, but that's all part of the process. Dodgy phone pics all, but you'll get a sense of what has been going on.

The planty one

April comes and it's as though Nature has flipped a switch. Within a couple of weeks the garden and the woods have started to, well, burgeon is really the only word.

Back in February, I gathered these two photos together to remind myself that winter *would* eventually yield to spring and then to summer.

All change! Knocksink wood in winter and summer

But I don't need that reassurance now, the change is here ...

Malus ... perfect.

This year, I (and some helpers, thank you guys) did a lot of work simply splitting and moving things around in the garden. It's the sort of thing that more committed gardeners do regularly: splitting the perennials, ringing the changes in different parts of the garden, trying new things out. But it's really only over the last year or so that I feel I now have the time to do this sort of thing. And I'm loving it.

So: all the plants in and around the witch hazel and the Enkianthus in the back garden (one of my 'woodland' patches) were split and shifted around last autumn and this spring. The birches in the front garden now have an array of bleeding heart, Smilicina/Maianthemum and Pachyphragma macrophylla mixing in with all the spring bulbs that are lighting up that space too: narcissi and daffodils, anemones, scillas, that sort of thing... I love the space now and am hoping that the interest will continue with alliums, lilies and campion throughout the summer.

Spring under the birches in the front garden

Earlier in the spring I went to the annual GLDA seminar (thanks B!), and had a most enjoyable day listening to such erudite speakers as Thomas Rainer and Verney Naylor. I was a bit disappointed with the level of debate on the day, but the talks themselves were thoughtful and inspiring, even if the scale of the some of the work (e.g. Keith Wiley's Wildside Garden and Le Jardin Plume) was so daunting. My own patch looked very, very tiny on my return home. (Have a look at Le Jardin Plume: *one* of their squares is the same size as half of my back garden). Interesting thing too: since I've used Valentia pebbles and flags in my garden I asked B to paint the wooden fence--that he put up a couple of summers ago--what I thought would be a low-key purplish-slate colour. Here it is, in March, behind the rather bare and recently re-organised bed.

Hmm, not sure about the colour of that fence...

I came home that day, fresh from seeing recommendations from Verney that the perfect background for plants, to contrast well with their green, is a sort of red ochre. She showed many lovely images that proved her point. But the paint we had chosen looked a much more bluey purple than I imagined and I was more than a bit taken aback. I went through the 'oh for godsake how on earth can I imagine I should be let loose in a garden at all, I can't even get a background colour right' thing. But all was not lost... a fellow gardener (and architect) suggested that at these latitudes the cooler colours are a better backdrop and as spring has worked its magic and the plants have grown at the foot of and in front of the fence I've come to like it better. We'll see how it works as time goes on. Better than bare breeze blocks anyway. Here it is today:

Fence settling in 1...

Fence settling in 2...

Apologies for the pics, btw, they're just phone ones since my camera is being mended at the moment.

In other plant news, the Dublin and Ulster Shows of the Alpine Garden Society have been and gone. Some of my plants even did well at both shows (in the Novices section, natch): I got some firsts at both shows as well as a couple of thirds at the Dublin one.

Here's a beautiful tulip that won me a First at the Ulster Group AGS show:

My Tulipa clusiana var. chrysantha (photo by catchlight.ie)

I also put a picture in the Artistic Section in both shows this year and it came first in both!

There are always lots of amazing plants at these shows: the results of painstaking effort on the part of their growers and nurterers. Here's one that won the much-coveted Farrer medal (well done Val!). It's Draba longisilqua, and is probably the parent of the Draba I was kindly given by another AGS expert a couple of years ago. Mine is still alive, but there hasn't been a single flower on it yet this year. Go figure!

Draba longisiliqua, grown by Val Keegan, winner of the AGS Farrer Medal in Dublin, April 2015

Spring weather has been a mixed bag here and this weekend was typical - sunny and showery; sunny and cold. A wet Saturday morning in Mount Usher gardens meant a quiet walk with few people around; not the best weather for visiting a garden, but even with the rain, there were moments of beauty:

Intricacies of a beech hedge in Mount Usher gardens

Fallen blossom in a rill in Mount Usher gardens

Go well all.

The eyes have it

The light lingers longer in the evenings. We've passed the eight hours between sunrise and sunset. The snowdrops are blooming now under the trees.

But still, January sometimes feels like the longest month.

In the gardening groups on facebook, gardeners at these latitudes have started posting photos from last summer, desperate reminders that colour will return, that there'll be a feeling of abundance in our gardens again. May and June will come around!

Meanwhile, to keep some of us occupied, there are seeds to be sown. For me, it's the first year that I've ordered from the AGS and my seeds arrived this week to much excitement (and much trepidation!) A gardener in the AGS gave me some small pots for the sowing (I keep repeating it here, but gardeners really are a generous bunch), so I just have to get a bit more organised next weekend: make sure I have the right mix of compost and grit, find a place to put the pots once they're sown, sow the seeds, and then hope...

Seeds in from the AGS: an Easy Pack and some selected from the main Seed List

Away from a dreary garden, the woods have held onto some charm, in spite of the time of year. Mosses and ferns in Massey wood are a beautiful foil to the grey light, and the odd hollowed-out tree provides some adventure for a small grey dog.

Mossy Massey

Ferns and mosses provide green in the winter woodland

The schnauzer investigates...

I learnt recently that hollowed out trees can provide great homes for small beasties and are very valuable for that reason. It was a tree surgeon who told me, very early one morning here in our own small bit of the Dublin suburban sprawl. Around eight in the morning I heard a chain saw on the go: not that usual for mid-December in a quiet suburb. I assumed that a neighbour was getting some shrubs cut down but discovered, to my horror, that the one large and lovely tree that's on our local little green space was being cut down.

The lime tree in our local tiny green on a December morning - about to be cut down and removed

I wasn't the only one who was standing there aghast. Other neighbours had arrived too, to stare in disbelief.

Apparently, someone had complained of the tree's interfering with their light. The tree had been 'assessed' and deemed dangerous as it is slightly hollowed out. The decision was made at some desk in the local council to cut the tree down completely.

This story has a happier ending than you might think.

The tree surgeon rang the council; talked earnestly about angry residents (which conjures up visions of all of us wielding pitchforks and flaming torches; the truth was we were standing there forlorn and shocked, though also determined); and the tree got a stay of execution. Unfortunately, the work had started, so they still had to cut the tree back by a lot, to balance out what they had already done. And so: we still have the tree, but only just. Let's hope it grows back okay and continues to delight us throughout the year. It's a lime tree, so provides all sorts of delights throughout the year: shelter for the birds and the beasts of course, and for us that wonderful delicate scent on summer mornings and evenings, and a warm glow in autumnal light as the year moves on.

The lime tree in late summer light a couple of years ago: this view from my back garden

The same tree, also from my back garden, at moonrise on a January evening, after its stay of execution

This all does beg the question about how these decisions are made. It seems to me that much of the decision-making is based on overly strict and careful notions of 'health and safety' (read, 'avoid insurance claims') and little balanced argument in terms of other benefits that come to all of us from having mature trees in our environment.

But to end on a more optimistic note. The drawing classes continue apace. Very formal as I've mentioned before. Very rigorous, really. I'm enjoying them - I think of it as fitting in well with the other 'slow' movements that have been around over the last few years (around food, living, etc.): this class is about slowing down, about taking time to set up a drawing, taking time to really look at something, taking time to place a mark on the page, taking time to assess that mark. All of this is difficult for me as I'm always wanting to get to an output or an outcome of some sort, but the discipline of the class is helping me to realise the importance of the process itself. And since some of the best photographers and artists I know work this way, well it must be worth a shot!

Practice and process and learning to slow down;
a poor photo of some of my attempts on newsprint

Have a good week all.