I have been terribly lazy about gardening this year, not least because our next-door neighbours, who had been making increasingly desperate attempts to sell their house for the last 6 years or so, finally sold it, making me feel that I no longer needed to feel guilty about the fact that our garden is wild, woolly (and apparently now infested with ( Read more... )

I am very taken with the colour and texture of young oak leaves in the sun just now.   Before they become green, they are golden yellow and blush red at the tips.( Read more... )

Oak tree on top of Kit Hill, 1095ish feet up in the sky.  He is perhaps two feet tall, and has a definite air of clinging on by his toenails.  This must be at the limit of what an oak can survive

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The garden has been becoming slowly less garden and more jungle.  I quite like it a bit overgrown: I prefer that to the kind of garden where each plant is surrounded by a neatly-raked border of empty brown earth, or everything is covered in gravel.    I like the birds to have space, and to have bees and dragonflies and random flowers popping up ( Read more... )

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 As the price of oil and gas has gone up, and up, wood burning stoves have become the thing to have.   And as woodburning stoves have become popular, wood which previously had no economic value has become worth paying money for ( Read more... )

 There's an excellent letter in the Western Morning News from the secretary of http://www.orchardslive.org.uk/ (the organisation that I think is mostly behind my lovely North Devon Mazzards! )  extolling the virtues of 'traditional'  big apple trees with 10 foot stems in smaller gardens ( Read more... )

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I have a new cherry tree and a new pear tree!

( Cherry 'Birchenhayes' )