Gardens big and small

This is the house where my aunt lives in Norfolk. Isn't it wonderful? Why she lives there is a long story, but the latter part of it is that she and three friends - one other unmarried lady and one married couple - the man of the couple being very much younger than any of the women - retired here 31 years ago. My aunt and the married couple bought the house between them but because the much-younger-husband would probably outlive them all, he gradually paid my aunt back for her part of it. So (alas!) the wonderful house will never be my inheritance. But that's all right because every two years since Son was a toddler we have come here for a holiday, which has been such a blessing and joy. The inhabitants of the house all have flats upstairs and the downstairs part has always been communal - for visitors and village activities.

Now two of them have died and my aunt (88 and a half) and the widower of her friend and owner of the house (now 71) still live there. It's lovely for her because, though they live separate lives in separate flats, he keeps an eye on her and does all the stuff she can't do - speaking on the phone (she's very deaf), technical things and anything requiring a lot of muscle.

The garden is large and lovely. My aunt works in it almost every afternoon. Gardening keeps you young. Or at least I'm hoping it does.

That tree in the middle is a pine - grown from seed by one of the friends from a cone picked up in Spain. It's now about 30 feet high.

To the side of the main garden is a walled garden, of which this is part.

It has fruit trees, herbaceous plants and lots of shrubs.

Perfect for strolling round...

 ... and catching glimpses of the house...

... and meeting ducks, woodpigeons, cats and (this year) muntjac deer - all of which clearly think that it's their garden.

But now we're home and I have been battling with nature in my relatively small garden. One flowerbed, as I've said, is infested with little allium bulbs. I foolishly bought, years ago, some of those little bulbs that have mildly decorative small white flowers and though I immediately decided that they weren't worth having, it's impossible to get rid of them. Somehow they root themselves quite deeply and they have lots and lots of little bulblets. Extracting the parent bulb is not an easy task: you dig down and down and eventually decide that this must be far enough and so you heave your trophy in triumph to the surface only to find that the stem has shed the bulb, which is nowhere to be found. Even if, by some miracle, you get the bulb, you know that deep below, laughing at you, there are lots of teeny white bulblets the size of babies' tears just waiting to spring into life next year. These bulblets don't actually flower for some years, but just throw up little skinny grasslike leaves which look really messy. So you dig down, down, down to try to extract them... and so your life ebbs away.

I also have problems with bluebells, as I've mentioned, but at least they're pretty. On the other hand, they seed all over the place if you don't descend on them like a wolf on the fold and remove the fading flowers. And then there's lily of the valley - lovely, with the fragrance you would hope to meet in heaven but (in my garden) evil underground roots that spread sideways and pop up shoots that can pierce concrete. Well, cracks between paving stones. And, worse, they tangle themselves up in other plants that are supposed to be there.

I like gardening really. Most of the time.

Garden envy

After Durham, Mr Life and I proceeded to North Norfolk to visit my aunt. The house where she lives is a story in itself, for another post, but this is the view from a sitting room window. The garden is huge and lovely.

This, however, is at the royal residence of Sandringham again. The only disadvantage that I can see to being married to Prince Charles ... oh well, yes, maybe there are a few others ... but anyway, the only disadvantage that I'm going to talk about just now is that there are so many royal houses that you'd be flitting from one to the other and could never enjoy a whole year of one garden. For example, the Royal Family spend Christmas and, I think, Easter at Sandringham - anyway, they weren't there when we were (otherwise they would have meanly kept us out of the garden) so they missed all this beauty.

Personally, I have a neverending fight to eradicate the Spanish bluebells in my garden (method: dig them all up every year and somehow you'll still have lots the next year) but Her Maj doesn't need to bother. She has the rolling acres that I would like but do not have, so a few thousand bluebells here or there make no difference to her. You probably can't see in the above photo but her hostas have a few holes in them, suggesting that she also has the snails that I don't want but do have.

Look at this rhododendron! Isn't it delicious?

Azalea, Japanese maple, bluebells, and I'm not sure what the green leaves are. Paeonies, maybe? I love the combination of colours; again, easier if you have lots of space to play with.

Ice cream! Each cluster of flowers is as big as Grandson's head.

A nice little winding stream, no doubt dug out by underpaid Victorian gardeners. (Something else I don't have. )

Isn't cow parsley pretty under this magnolia? With the copper beech in the background. Swoon.

Ah, the reflections on the water which I also don't have room for.

That's the main house in the distance. It's rather nice too.

Does anyone know what these wonderful blue flowers are? Her Maj has huge drifts of them. I've seen them before but can't quite think what they are. *

I'm writing this in a somewhat damp condition. I came in from my more modest plot - where I was attempting to repair the ravages of ten days' neglect (how can so many weeds grow in so short a time?) - because it started raining. It was fairly unconvincing rain and I ignored it for a while but there comes a point that you have to admit defeat even when rained on only mildly. It's kind of stopped now - ish - but I suppose Mr L will be expecting to be fed shortly. He has a cold. I hear distant coughing. Poor Mr L.

* They're camassia - thank you, Relatively Retiring. I've now looked up "How to grow camassia": heavy moist soil that doesn't get waterlogged in winter. So - not the problem bed at the front door that forms puddles in heavy rain. Pity. They're happy naturalised on the bank of a stream, it seems. And they spread. Perfect for Sandringham but maybe not so much for my little urban plot, where I spent a LONG TIME today digging out little spreading allium bulbs, to add to my bluebell woes. If only plants would grow to the size you want them and then stop. Not to say children. And oneself.

Durham and the deluge

Why were we in Durham, you ask? (Well, you didn't; but I'll tell you anyway.) We were there for a late celebration of Mr Life's 65th birthday, which was an especially momentous one in my mind because his father sadly died at the age of 64, when our son was 12 days old. Ever since then - so for over 28 years - it's been my ambition to get Mr Life past this age. Success!

All of our children and their spouses and also my brother, his wife and offspring met up. We chose Durham because it's about half way between Edinburgh and London/Cambridge, where the southern contingent live. We stayed at the Radisson Blu Hotel, which we thought was very good - modern, comfortable with very helpful staff. There were also big red swivelly chairs in the reception area, which most of us enjoyed sitting in at various times.

We did quite a lot of this sort of thing.

The younger ones went swimming in the hotel pool. Granddaughter was so exhausted by her first swim that she fell asleep before she could get dressed.

On the Saturday afternoon we visited the Cathedral (very impressive, with variously-patterned pillars which I greatly liked). The youngest members of the party decided to snooze through this.

Most of us posed for a photo. It was beginning to rain.

As we got back to the hotel, the rain was quite heavy and it struck us that the river was getting rather high. The hotel is the building on the left. We hoped that the river wasn't going to burst its banks. We stood on the footbridge and watched the water whooshing downstream, carrying lots of big branches and two dead sheep. Oh dear.

Very soon, the water started to spill on to the road outside the hotel. Hmm, we thought.

This was the view from our room about ten minutes later. Yes, that's the road on the left side of the fence.

Meanwhile we enjoyed a meal in our private room ... on the ground floor. (Look at that flip chart on the wall at the back. I felt I ought to be giving a lecture. But I didn't have any felt markers with me.)

Grandson, in his smart shirt and trousers, played with his tactahs between courses. Fortunately the hotel is up a flight of steps from the road, but the water was still rising.

Oblivious, Granddaughter - wearing her party dress - beamed at Son.

The water stayed - just - on the other side of that flowerbed.

See it lapping the foot of the hotel steps?

The view down the street at 11 pm.

By about 12.15 am, the water started receding and by 8 in the morning it looked like this. I'm not sure I would have parked my car there, though.

Home again, home again...

We have been away: here - Durham...

... and here - Sandringham, one of the Queen's little places. (We visit Sandringham about every two years and I always slightly wonder if perhaps I ought to have made more effort to get Prince Charles to marry me. Just for the gardens, you know. Not the official visits or the posh frocks.)

And now we're back. You know that way when you come into a lovely tidy house and dump your holiday things and all of a sudden it's a bit of a mess? With no food in the fridge? So I'd better go and do something about it.

Spring and steroids

This is not my garden, though that's also looking good at the moment with all the spring flowers. The photo is of a flowerbed in Bruntsfield Links on the way home from piano the other day. It's been so cold that everything is very late this year, but at last we have lots of colour.

It's still quite chilly, though. Today has been reasonably sunny and when you're in the sun you think, ah yes, it's really quite a warm day. Then the sun goes behind a cloud and you change your mind.

Well, I mustn't witter on because we have a visitor arriving tomorrow and there's nothing like guests to make you look critically at the state of your skirting boards.

The visitor, who is American, has brought some cunning cat treats with little pockets in them for you to insert your cat's pill. She says that her cats eat them happily so I'll try one on Sirius tomorrow.  The latest diagnosis is asthma and he's on steroids. He seems (fingers crossed) much better. At the moment I'm still grinding his pill up, mixing it with Greek yogurt and then wiping the goo on his paws. He now sighs when he sees me coming but obligingly allows me to smear him and then licks it off. But the pocket-treat idea sounds much better.

Off I go to wield a damp cloth.

Mr Life: OAP

Thank you so much for your kind admiration of our hall. I would like to take full credit for it since I had the idea of knocking down that bit of wall. However, I have to admit that ... umm ... I didn't have any practical input. Stevie and George did the building, Mr Life did the decorating and the floor chaps put the floor down. I supplied encouragement and cups of tea and afterwards did a bit of dusting. I also found the spare wallpaper, forgotten in a cupboard, which meant that we could make the remaining bit of wall match the rest of the hall without having to redo the whole lot. (It's a sort of blue-ish green, Lynley.)

Today is Mr Life's 65th birthday (yes, hasn't he worn well? it's the way I've pampered him over the years). He got a watch and some railway books and Grandson got a sandpit.

 He liked it.

You can see by his hooded top and corduroy trousers that it wasn't exactly blazing hot summer weather.

The sandpit has a roof to keep the sun off him...

... or as the case may be, the rain.

Hall

The little hall project is finished at last. Above - before, looking down the stairs.

And - after. I like it much better and only wish that we'd done it earlier in the 24 years we've been in this house. I've been thinking about it for about 20 of them.

I've looked through about forty million pictures on Picasa and can find very few of the hall in its previous state - really only the one in my top picture. Clearly we never lingered there before. I'm not sure that we'll exactly be holding parties there now but if we did, it would seem more spacious..

This is taken from the other direction, towards the front door. You can just see the banister at the foot of the stairs, to the right of the bookcase.

Anyway, we seem to have been in some chaos for some time, what with brick dust, plaster dust, paint, wallpaper, sawdust... but now we're getting tidied up. I think Grandson appreciates the clearer surface for wheeing his cars up and down. The cats aren't so sure.

Car Teddy gets an outing

I'm frequently aware of the possibility that the passing reader might not find my grandchildren quite so endlessly charming as I do, so I thought - in the interests of balance - I'd post a couple of my less successful photos of them. Above, Grandson rather overdoes his effort to smile nicely for the camera...

 ... and here, Granddaughter can't believe that I'm going to take yet another photo of her.

So that allows me to slip in a couple of pictures of Grandson walking in the Botanics on Tuesday carrying his teddy - how cute is that?

This is Car Teddy. He's supposed to live in the car, for journey amusement, but got a little outing instead. And miraculously, he didn't get dropped during our two-hour walk in the gardens. After this walk, Granny was exhausted and Grandson seemed perfectly fresh. People kept enquiring if he was a boy or a girl. Maybe teddy-carrying isn't very macho.

As you can perhaps see, Tuesday was when summer began in Scotland. And ended. Today (above) was grey, with a chilly wind blowing off the sea when I met up with my friend Joyce in Queensferry. I would not have liked to be painting the Forth Bridge today (or, let's be honest, any day. I am not a person who likes a challenge).

Joyce is very involved in the community and, among other things, in the ongoing building of a cycle track. Again, I myself (being a wimp) would not care to be cyling over the carefully-constructed lumps, but I'm sure they'll be very popular with the young of the village.

Joyce indicates further lumps.

This looks like a nice safe ride but you can't see the precipice just to the left of the photo. Argh.