Garden tour

Inspired by the lovely Autumn Cottage Diarist blog and in imitation of the Ightham Mote Cobnuts Project blog which cleverly interweaves text and pictures, I thought I'd give you a tour of our garden. I should warn you however that it is nothing like the beautiful and beautifully tended plot at Autumn Cottage. (Links to both blogs in panel, right.)

I am ambivalent about flower gardening. I like my nature wild so I baulk at introducing non-native plants and then spending hours tending them. Nor do I like uprooting plants in the name of weeding. Frog's good at destructive gardening, preferably with a machine - hedgetrimming, mowing and chainsawing, but not keen on the detailed stuff. So our flowerbeds are a compromise, to say the least.

Note the birdfeeder in this bed, which was the stand for the For Sale sign outside our house when we bought it thirty-three years ago, never collected by the estate agents so turned upside down by Frog and put to good use.











My pride and joy are my raised vegetable beds, which I dug out myself from the steep slope that is our garden about five years ago (and then spent a month in agony lying on my front).

The beds vary in size because of the shape of the space but - in case you're interested - I have discovered that the ideal width is 2 1/2 to 3 feet. (Any wider and you can't reach the middle. Any narrower and you can't get much in.)

In the background of this picture (above right) you might see some scrap metal and a strange boat-shaped object lying in the hedge. These are variously an aerial, the rusting frame of a kit car and the base of a kit car. As I say, Frog always has lots of projects on the go . . .

You might also note the upward extension on the beds. Frog did this for me this autumn as rabbit-proofing (rabbits can't jump higher than about 18 inches I have discovered) and because the beds were starting to overflow.
And if you want an efficient, helpful and reasonably priced timber merchant in Mid Devon, I can thoroughly recommend Pennymoor Timber.
In the background of these pictures (left and above right) you can just see the mesh protecting my purple sprouting broccoli from pigeons and butterflies/caterpillars. Unfortunately when the snow landed on it last Friday the plants were completely flattened. I brushed all the snow off and I think they'll recover.

The beds were starting to overflow because, when I have time and when I want some strenuous exercise, I load them with compost and horse manure.

Both my compost bins and my horse-manure source (the stables next door) are at the bottom of hills - which means that full wheelbarrows have to be pushed uphill. Well, it's as good a way of working off the Christmas surplus as any.

In the picture on the right you might notice the fencing laid across the base of the hedge. This is Frog's attempt to stop the dog excavating rabbit holes and then coming home plastered in mud. Luckily the dog has found a way to climb on to the hedge and approach the rabbit holes from above. (I say 'luckily' because, if Dog is happy and busy, then so am I.)

Because our plot used to be an orchard, we are blessed with proper Devon hedge on all sides. Some of this is made up of elm which, as I'm sure you know, dies when it gets to a certain age. If you cut down the dead trees, the bases do sprout again, but we like to leave some of them for the woodpeckers.

Here (right) is some of Frog's scaffolding put to good use keeping pots out of the way of the rabbits.

(Plus a trellis cobbled together from some of what Frog calls 'racking'. It was being thrown out at one of the places where he works so perhaps I'd better not say too much about it. I tie my tomatoes to it in the summer.)

(Also some gutttering waiting to go up. Another project.)

This table is made of something called Plaswood which is recycled plastic. It has been sitting outside all year round for about ten years and is none the worse for wear. It is comfortable to sit on, being warm and non-splintery. And it also makes a good cutting surface when I want to remove roots etc from harvested vegetables.
Leaning against the table you might notice another piece of metal. This is part of a second-hand anemometer (wind-speed thingy) which Frog wants to get working again and put up. (Another project.)

And I think I'd better stop there before you fall off your seat with boredom.

Snow dog



Wild with excitement at this strange white stuff

Drifting snow and dog-tail



Spot the dog

Beams and motes

Being half-Norwegian my mother was ahead of her time with regard to health in so far as the British were concerned. We were pushed outside at every opportunity, even when in our prams. So much so that one of my sisters, with her tan, was taken for an Asian baby. The mainstays of our diet were potato soup, stewed apple and grated raw vegetables. She even managed to persuade my brothers’ prep school to introduce salad into their meals.

    In my teens and early twenties I suffered from anorexia and then compulsive eating. One of the ways I managed to cure myself was by concentrating on the quality of what I ate rather than the quantity. That led to an interest in complementary health and eventually I knew so much about the subject that I was paid to write about it – for magazines, encyclopaedias and partworks (the book/magazine hybrid that you buy in instalments).

    As a hangover from my eating disorder days however I can’t eat chocolate sensibly. I either have lots or I have none at all. I put up with this, allowing myself the occasional binge, as beating oneself up is part of the problem, and not beating oneself up part of the cure.

    On Monday I decided that, since I hadn’t had any chocolate since Christmas, it was time for a binge. I went down to the village shop and bought a mars bar, a mint aero, a small Cadbury’s milk chocolate and a small packet of chocolate raisins. (Posh chocolate is no good for binges. It has to be bog-standard stuff.) Back home I ate them all at once. I felt fine. After supper, I decided that I was still in binge mode, so I had four pieces of ryvita, butter and cheese, which I topped off with a handful of walnuts.

    During the night, my stomach – used to a near-vegan diet – started to complain. I felt violently sick and spent several hours hanging over the red-for-danger bowl that we keep for such purposes.

    The next morning as Frog and I ate our usual breakfast in bed we heard a news item (about a new-style Coca-Cola advertisement) which mentioned that two in three American adults are obese and one in three American children. I began to expound my theory about junk food, that because it lacks the necessary nutrients it doesn’t satisfy. Your body is looking for the vitamins, minerals and so on that it wants and so prompts you to keep eating. ‘A healthy diet is so important,’ I said.

    The room fell silent.

    ‘Ah,’ I said after a few minutes. ‘I’m a fine one to talk.’

    Luckily, Frog laughed otherwise I might have bopped him one.

A couple of the books to which I have contributed



Sunrise

A place apart

In the eighteenth century ‘gentlemen and ladies would sooner travel to the south of France and back again’ than venture down to the West Country (according to Gentleman’s Magazine, quoted in my Gothick Devon). This was because of the state of the roads, described as ‘all mud, which rises, spues and squeezes into the ditches’. Devon (and Cornwall) therefore remained as places apart.

    Belief in the supernatural for instance lingered long after it was scoffed at elsewhere and even in the twentieth century people remembered the old stories – of pixies, wild hunts, black dogs, hairy hands, devils (many of these stories documented by Ruth St Leger-Gordon in her 1964 book The Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor).

    James Ravilious (son of war artist Eric Ravilious), who had trained as an accountant and then taught art in London, moved to Devon in 1972. Having recently taken up photography, he was asked by the Beaford Art Centre in North Devon to start a small archive of local pictures. So entranced was he however by what he encountered that the project took seventeen years. He realised that he was documenting a vanishing rural way of life and went on to take similar pictures in France, Italy, Greece and Ireland.
    The 5,000 photographs he took of Devon are now recognised as an internationally important collection. Do check them out (www.jamesravilious.com ). They’re funny, moving and quirky. (I won’t reproduce any here as they’re in copyright and, as an author suffering from illegal downloads of my books, the last thing I want to do is infringe anyone else’s rights.) The pictures are available as cards too, which was how I came across them.

    When I first came to Devon in 1971 I thought it was a bit of a dump. It rained all the time and there were no shops. I returned however in 1976 and grew to love the place. Whenever I passed the blue ‘Welcome to Devon’ sign on the M5 or the ‘Devon’ sign on the A303, when returning from some visit to family in the south-east, my head would clear and my heart would lift. I would feel free again. It was something to do with the space and the lack of people and the fact that everyone was poor so money didn’t count for much.

    Now I don’t want to moan (then again, perhaps I do), but that doesn’t happen any more. Devon is now like everywhere else. The population has doubled in the last forty years. They are building a new town a few miles away from where we live and we can see the lights at night. A phone mast stares in at our bedroom window. The hedges are enclosed in fences, the wild patches are disappearing. People rush around in smart cars.

    At the end of December Frog bought a Telegraph. (I know, I’m sorry. He says it’s a good read and ‘you don’t have to believe it’.) We hardly ever buy newspapers but he wanted to look at the New Year’s Honours List. I browsed through it and came across a page of aphorisms from famous people – their favourite of the pieces of advice they’d been given over the course of their lives. Most of the advice gave me that awful weary feeling that New Year’s Resolutions do but one piece I loved. It was from the writer Susan Hill and it went something like, ‘If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.’

    Sorry, this is turning into rather a long post, but I will get to the point eventually, I promise.

    As an inflexible Taurean, I run my life on military lines – lists of goals, daily ‘to do’ lists, one job finished before another is started, etc etc. Frog on the other hand is a slippery Piscean. He only ever does anything when it’s urgent. He has hundreds of jobs on the go at once. If I make him a list he loses it or writes something silly on the end like ‘Be happy’. 'Nature is strong,' says another Piscean, a sister-in-law, when I wail at the development of Devon.

    So what I’ve been thinking is this. What you see reflects what you are inside, so maybe it’s me I’ve built over. It’s me who’s becoming too civilised. Maybe I need to take Susan Hill’s advice and do nothing occasionally. Take a break at the end of the 'to do' list.* Wait before starting a new one. Sit down. Watch the birds. Even if I can no longer find that place apart outside, I can still find it inside.

    And at least the mud never goes away.

*It occurred to me while out walking Dog this morning (Sunday) that I could even take a break in the middle of a 'to do' list, or even - heaven forfend - before starting to tackle one. Would the world survive without me? I shall just have to see.