This page will be updated regularly with photos of our garden. Try not to get too excited...
The Terraformation, Transformation and Transmogrification of a French Farm.
Some may find gardening a boring subject, and they're probably right. But this. This garden. This is something else.This is also a money pit...
link to 2015. The first year in our Forever Home
link to 2016. Settling in.
link to 2017. Time to plant.
link to 2018.
2021
April 2021
Easter. It's a weird one isn't it?
What's it all about? Why does it keep moving around so that you cannot pin it down?
Is it to do with bunny rabbits? Chocolate? Zombies? Chocolate zombie rabbits?
Well no. Which is a great shame because chocolate zombie bunnies could have been the next big thing.
Easter is simply another pagan festival highjacked by some christian zealots. It is, in fact, an ancient festival celebrating the rebirth of the sun at our vernal equinox, when the power of the sun returns & life is born again.
This is why the weeds are such a bloody problem this time of year.
Easter is the festival of Eostre, a Saxon Goddess of sunrise, spring, fertility, new life & immortality.
And it's all to do with hormones...
The world around us is controlled, not by governments, not by money, not by the Daily Mail, not by pesky artificial intelligences, not even by chocolate zombie bunnies, but by a higher power.
Hormones.
Everything you do, every breathe you take, every move you make, every bond you break, has behind it the power of hormones. How we behave, how we interact, how we develop, even how we evolve, is defined by hormones.
Sex, drugs, rock 'n roll.
Blame it all on hormones.
Just take a look at this guy:
or what about this guy?
Did they end up like this by accident?
No.
Were they designed?
No.
Were they selected for?
Hell yeah!
The power behind evolution is natural selection, but sexual selection is everywhere you look. Especially in Cardiff town centre...
The start of this lockdown sees, in our garden, the unlocking of the forces of nature. All driven by hormones. Love and war. It's all here, enshrined in complex molecular detail. You gotta love nature...
With another nearly thirty blogs to go, I suspect that sex will rear it's ugly head on more than a few occasions.
Why else would you read them?
Why else would I write them?
Previous warnings have been given. Attempting to write blogs about life in lockdown when most of my time is spent in the garden, then, well, inevitably, most of the posts will be about said garden.
And here's the first.
Of many.
Three days ago I invited you into our garden, and here it is...
First off, a quick visit around most of the garden, with the help of daughter v1. I'll try something similar at the end of lockdown to see how much it has grown. If I am still on the right side of sanity...
For those of you awaiting the latest news about the four new arrivals, all four are alive and well! Yay!
Here's a pic of me candling one of the little darlings. Say hi to Fuqua...
You can just make out some blood vessels forming in there...
Here's roughly what it looks like inside...
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I'm lucky. I'm privileged. I can walk around our garden each and every day.
It is full of colour, it is full of variety, full of hundreds of different plants and the occasional weed (ahem) but, hidden within it's secret places, it is full of memories. Memories of people.
I wish you were here...
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
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| Adaline |
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| Mum & Dad |
Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
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| Dominique |
Hot ashes for trees?
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| Pippa |
Cold comfort for change
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| Genneviève |
Did you exchange
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| Danny & Sammy |
A walk-on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
What have we found?
The same old fears.
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| Celia. |
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Finally, my 'Exploding Head Syndrome' (man-flu) has waned to an unpleasant memory, leaving me free to take you by the hand (figuratively, virtually, definitely not literally) into the deep dark woods.
As if a hectare of garden is not enough punishment for my heinous crimes, shovel upon me another hectare of woodland.
Step with me into this fantastic place...
We shall enter by its fortified gateway, protected by the ubiquitous monster, then follow the trail past Aslan's stone table, zip-wire, hide (sic) and hilltop, stumble across the cabin in the woods (the treehouse folly), then to catch a glimpse of distant Montauban, before being safely delivered back into civilisation (but not as we know it).
Let me take you to this fantastic place, keep the rest of your life away...
Over time, my 'duck-billed dinosaurs' have evolved into creatures strange, quirky and varied. So to has my garden, although over a very much shorter span of time. It just doesn't feel like it...
It is, however, strange, quirky and varied.
Each part of the garden has waited for one of those 'ah-ha' moments, when parts previously purely functional could be made into something aesthetically pleasing. In this way the gas reservoir became the swing seat, the rain overspill became the lotus pond, some unused banking became the aviary, the forest became the fantastic place.
Despite this constant reappraisal, there have been a couple of underlying rules. Everything is designed to draw you further into the garden. You can only see a small part from each area, each 'room'. Each 'room' should have some quirky nature to it, each 'room' should have its own view.
There may well be many more years of development yet, but we have pretty much achieved what we set out to do.
This video is to give you a taste of those views from each room. I'll do more videos like this to show the changes over the seasons. Hopefully we'll be out of lockdown by then...
Any quirky ideas will be gratefully received. Practical would be good to. Spare cash...
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It is a deeply comforting feeling being in control, or at least near-control, of a garden. Of course, you can never be in full control, nature will always bite you in the arse. Its denizens will aim to blight your work, or even bite your legs. It sends out waves of microscopic particles to irritate your innermost bodily parts. Vigilance is required.
Keeping a hectare of garden under domination is hard work, but worth every erg of energy expended. Today used up a lot of ergs, weeding, repairing, pruning and mowing, alive alive-oh. But the fruits of this labour are beginning to flourish.
Daily, there is change. What was once a wall of red Photinia leaves now transmogrifies into cauli-like flowers...
Japanese roses are bloomin'.
Bizarre alien creatures are appearin'...
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| Columbine |
Or, looking at it another way...
It's hard work, but it is work that pays huge dividends. It should be an Olympic non-contact sport.
If it was, I would gladly take part. However, the winners would always be a foregone conclusion...
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| Honey bee on Cotoneaster |
The engine of our ecology.
Welcome to the Money Pit; our little corner of paradise...
I can't tame my back garden, let alone umpteen hectares. I admire your vision and hard work! Valerie
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