The Week of the Lavender

Four generations of us - my mother-in-law, my hsband and myself, our two daughters and our grand-daughter - went on holiday to North Yorkshire last week. (Our son is busy finishing his last hospital placement at the moment and he and his wife couldn't be with us). It is a lovely part of the world and we went on this train to Whitby for the beach, the Abbey and the Dracula experience, but for me, the highlight of the week was the Wolds Way Lavender Farm

I do love lavender; there are so many varieties, and the scent is so powerful - and not at all oldlady-ish - and the bees and butterflies were everywhere. It was developed on the site of a run-down pig farm, and as well as the commercial side of things, it tries to be as sustainable as possible. The distillation process is fuelled by their own wood, and the ground surrounding the display and production areas has been landscaped to encourage wildlife.

I came home with five new varieties of lavender for my garden, some tips on growing them well, and a lot of inspiration. Now I am picking up the threads of my poetry life and my garden, and looking forward to being involved in an archaeological project in our local Abbey. I'm not sure yet just what this will entail, but it sounds very promising. Watch this space as the project unfolds!

Air and Sunlight

Yesterday was the first good opportunity to get into the garden, and I spent a fair bit of time doing what my father would have called "letting the dog see the rabbit". Everything was lush and wet and overgrown, and there is some serious mildew and rust because of all the damp. I cut back all the spent flowers - much more than I expected, as it turned out. Last year the rocket went on producing new blooms right into October, but this year we got one glorious swathe of flower, and then it all went over at once, which means that I could cut it right down, let some air and sunlight into the borders, and hopefully, prevent it self-seeding all over the place like it did last year.

Most of the vegetables seemed to like the rain. We had three good pickings off the peas, and the sun has come at the right time for the beans.

I've been growing potatoes in sacks for the last year or two, as Bob Flowerdew recommends. Last year wasn't so hot, and I really resented the amount of potting compost it took. This year I did something different. When we returfed the lawn, I saved the old stuff to make a loam stack, and the first lot seemed to be ready. It wasn't quite, and ground elder had rampaged through the whole stack, so I had to seive it all to get rid of the roots, but with a little 6x to beef it up it did pretty well, and I was quite impressed with the haul.

I'm really pleased with the garlic, too. It went in last November, after Monty Don told everyone to put it in. I went to the Garden Centre and asked for it and the assistant said "You've been watching THAT PROGRAMME!" so I guess half of Stirling had been in on the same errand.

It wasn't all about the food, though. The robins are back and the great tits. I've noticed them checking out the new nest-box, so I hope it will get used next year. There are young greenfinches and chaffinches trying out their wings, a second brood of sparrows, and wrens and dunnocks seem to be singing as much as in May. I should have known they'd be back - our village is notorious for infestations of harvest mites - known as berry bugs here - and they are biting ferociously just now! The flowers are much less in evidence, as the roses took a battering, but this pot of french lavender is at its best.

Seedlings and birdcalls

This is the little waterfall at Fingask. It's one of the last pictures I took before my camera gave up the will to live, and my interim solution, which is to take photos on my phone, doesn't impress me much. So the waterfall is to take the bare look off the post, rather than to illustrate it.

Not that the sort of photos I'm able to take can do today justice. I've had a phenomenal day. It started when I was hanging washing on the line, and about twenty curlews flew over the garden, obviously heading up-river to the nice boggy country round Flanders Moss. Just hearing them warm up their beautiful calls put me in the spring-time mood. There were oyster-catchers later on too. They'll stick around. The river banks and Airthrey Loch just up the road are ideal for them to nest in, and we'll hear their teenage-style all-night partying for several months.

So I've been gardening. Not just the kind of out-door housework kind of thing you do while you're still thinking about it, but real live planting, dividing congested clumps of snowdrops and crocuses, and planting out some michaelmas daisies to extend the pollen season for bees and hoverflies.I have potatoes chitting in the greenhouse, and sweetpeas and asters in trays. I've sowed seeds too, tomatoes, chillies and geraniums, and this year's big experiment, melons. I chose a variety called Emir, because it tolerates low temperatures. This is partly to give the greenhouse soil a rest from tomatoes - those I grow this year will be in big pots, not soil - and partly because I wasnt to see if I can. They've just begun to germinate, and I'm very excited about them.

the garden is really beginning to green up. The snowdrops are just about over, but the primroses are closer to blooming every time I look at them, and the alkanet and pulmonaria are coming through, and there is blossom on the japonica, and catkins on the birch, hazel and sallows. No bees yet, and no frogspawn, though there are frogs getting bolder and more active by the day.

And in the house there are so many poems beginning to wriggle and hatch. I've been putting all the scraps and notes and stray lines and images together, and it looks like there has been a hotbed of ideas in the back of my mind where The Territory of Rain sequence has been germinating for a year or two. Now to prick them out in a proper notebook, and see what the crop is like!