Sign of hope

With reference to the previous 'snowy' blog, I discovered, amongst my drafts, the following text and images, written well over a year ago, after a visit to Egglestone Hall  Gardens and thought it was a pity to waste it...

Just before the snow arrived last week, I paid my annual visit to the tiny abandoned churchyard in the grounds of the wonderful Egglestone Hall Gardens to view the snowdrops. There are other places nearby that also have wonderful snowdrops but Egglestone Hall's churchyard is somewhere extra special  with its own particular ambience.

Abandoned churchyard at Egglestone Hall

It always feels as if there's a story there just waiting to be told. (Wendy please note!)

One almost expects to see a figure rise up from behind one of the ancient gravestones - probably a cliched lady in a long grey dress and bonnet  (must stop reading the Brontes). She'd be clutching a tiny posy of snowdrops, just picked from one of the graves...

Snowdrops nestling in the shelter of a grave

Soil is memory made flesh...

Soil is memory made flesh
is past and present combined:
nothing goes away
               Maggie O'Farrell

Before

I was in despair at the end of last year.
The left hand side fence of Pablo's garden had to be replaced, accordingly everything at that side of the border had to be ruthlessly cut back.  This was what remained!

and after!

With the New Year came resolution - I would look on the blank canvas as an opportunity and replant as necessary.
The pre-existing clematis montana and climbing roses had become so overgrown that, try as I might, I couldn't control them as I wanted. Now I could begin anew.  I have repositioned many of the garden ornaments in the border and indulged in a number of different clematis. New climbing roses are next on my shopping list.

The brilliant Norman has been and wrestled with the rampant ivy on the garage and the two huge pear trees and succeeded with taming the trees on the right hand border  All that is needed now is another general tidying session if the weather holds.

And look what has appeared almost overnight 

Sign of hope in despair

'A gentle creature, with beauty all her own...'

         











I can't wait to see what appears next!

I will make even more good resolutions...

...to fill my brain with remote books and habits

Snowdrops in Egglestone Hall churchyard

I suppose the first and most important resolution has to be to maintain A Garden for Pablo.

To this end I propose to whizz through 2015, beginning with an image taken at Egglestone Hall in early January. The snowdrops here in Pablo's Garden are just beginning to peep through whereas I suspect that in friend Wendy's garden they are in full bloom already.

A Mad Hatter garden fountain

Determining to concentrate on sourcing plants with a literary connection in an attempt to create a garden suitable for a book lover, I was delighted, whilst visiting Harrogate Spring Fair, to find a company specialising in characters from Alice in Wonderland - it being 150 years since the book was published.


Sadly, the prices were prohibitive so I'll have to continue to buy my weekly lottery tickets and  live in hope.

The Jubilee Park in Spennymoor is always a joy to behold.
I go there regularly to check on the two park benches we placed there, near the bowling green, one for my Aunt  and Uncle who loved this park where I spent hundreds of happy hours when small and one in memory of The Seven Law sisters - especially Frances, my mother - who was brought up in a small stone house in Park Street, just outside the boundary wall of Jubilee Park.

Tulips in Jubilee Park in May

     

May beats April in Pablo's Garden for colour and vitality.
The bluebell and forget-me-not paint vast sweeps of the left hand border a most delightful azure blue but it is the acid green of the euphorbia robbiae that shimmers and dazzles.

May border with euphorbia

It is the spectacular light  in May, however, that transforms even the most  mundane of plants
into a shimmering wonderland of colour.
                                                                           

May tulips


The garden must first be prepared in the soul
or else it will not flourish
English proverb


Review of 2015 to be continued...

A quick pick-me-up

For me, January is always the most depressing month of the year but, statistically, February is the month when most suicides occur. 

The grounds of Redworth Hall

To overcome that February feeling I recommend a walk in a garden – almost any garden would do – but if you’ve time take a quick drive to Redworth Hall near Shildon to see the snowdrops and aconites and you’ll find your winter blues disappear. I guarantee it.

 

Snowdrops and aconites

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And we shall have snow

And we shall have snow...

Fairies at work again

No wonder the English talk about the weather all the time. Last week basking in temperatures higher than Athens and this week the wind-chill factor brings snow and ice. And this in April - a month associated with sunshine and those delicate rain showers that help spring clean the borders and put a shine on the faces of even the most sceptical of shrubs.

 

Tiny leaves of epimediums

Plants pushing their way skywards are warmly welcomed into the bosom of April whose bounty knows no bounds. In the extremely dry right-hand border of the garden under the old holly tree the epimediums are beginning to show. Perfect ground cover, they spread like wildfire and produce delicate, pale yellow flowers which contrast well with dicentra spectabilis, commonly known as Bleeding Heart because of the drooping, heart-shaped flowers, which appear at the end of April and continue unabashed until the end of June.

Dicentra just beginning to show

Clematis armandii

April sunshine brings out the best of the evergreen clematis armandii at the bottom of the garden, with its wonderfully 

delicate flowers smelling appetisingly of vanilla. 

This is a vigorous climber which needs to be kept in check but which will flower a second time in September if you are very fortunate.

Likewise the graceful small tree amelanchior, full of blossom now in April, which also rewards us later in the year with the most wonderful autumn colour.

Amelanchior in the snow

A miniature Japanese flowering cherry holds forth in my minute version of Vita Sackville-West’s ‘white garden’, a companion plant for the wild garlic leaves whose sword-like leaves are just beginning to thrust through the undergrowth. 

Elsewhere the borders are springing into life. Pale colours dominate currently – white and lemon and gentle pink – but soon they will be transformed with forget-me-not blue in abundance and the azure shades of the bluebells with their heady perfume.

Eat your heart out Jo Malone!

Perchance Next Spring...

It is always a time for sadness when the early snowdrops – such a longed-for sign of hope after the dark winter days – begin to fade. I usually take consolation in re-reading a verse poem entitled ‘In the Garden’ contained within an old volume,  ‘Our Book of Poetry’, which must have been published in the 1930s as it was originally owned by my two older cousins who delighted in reading aloud to me from it.

Image from my old volume of poetry

I eventually became the proud possessor of the crumbling volume and it has pride of place on my bookshelves to this day, despite its pages being yellowed and splattered with my dirty fingerprints. 

‘In the Garden’ is very much of its time as it tells of a meeting between the last snowdrop(female) and the first crocus (male)  who, despite being the newcomer, takes centre stage and insists on telling his own story.

C Good morning, pretty lady!

S Good morning, gentle sir!

C ‘Tis very sweet that we should meet

    When springtime is astir!

S I watched you peeping upward,

   I watched you as you grew.

C Did you my dear? Upon my word

    I call that kind of you.

   You seem a gentle creature with beauty all your own.

   Pray tell me how it comes that you

   Are growing here alone?

S  I am the latest snowdrop.

    My sisters all are fled.

C  And I the earliest crocus bulb

     To blossom in this bed.

    Then shall we not be friends, my dear?

    And, as I love to talk

    I’ll tell you how I came to shine

   So gaily on my stalk.

S Do, sir!

And so on he goes, full of his own importance, until he finally comes to the end of his tale and suddenly realises his new friend looks most unhappy.

The last snowdrops

C  Nay, wherefore droop your dainty head?

S  Sir, you have come too late!

   My star is set, my day is done,

   My beauty on the wane:

   Yet, who can tell? Perchance, next spring

   We two may meet again!

                                                           Marie Bayne

Happy gardening!
Gillian