Skip to main content

rewilding and newts

I'm getting a bit lax with blog posts - partly because we are having a very lazy and quiet time at the moment and really I'm just enjoying some peace and some long awaited family time. (contradictory to say the least) most of my days are spent in the garden and its very calming - although we do live quite near a big road and on odd occasions it can be noisy but I think I'm just getting used to it as background noise now - I've been very spoilt living in very rural locations and the price we pay to be near a community and shop is more traffic.


The garden is proving to be quite amazing though and it is a complete joy to watch it unfold as the summer progresses.  It was one of the main reasons we bought this house - we don't have time to start a garden from scratch and this is a wonderful established space which we can work up to being how we like it.  The previous owner was a talented designer and has thoughtfully laid it out in an interesting way and is has been really well maintained - for us perhap a little too formally maintained ...so we are rewilding it a little bit and have some lawn as meadow (only a very wee patch at the moment) and letting the borders spill over and become a little be freer.


There is also this large space all pebbled and slates which we refer to as 'The Sculpture Park' as it contains many of the stone buddhas, dragons, lion statues we inherited - I'm trying to work out what to do with it to soften the edges and make it work for us - good place for a washing line but it needs more than that!


We have sat out in the garden quite a few evenings and have been delighted to find lots of frogs jumping about and when we shone a bright torch into the pond we spotted a newt feasting of little wormy things - I had originally thought the pond was more ornamental rather than wild life but I'm very excited to have newts!!! its a first for me.

We spent a lot of the sunny days painting the garden furniture - last year I was lamenting I had no outside seating and this year we could actually seat every stature in the garden and still have some space... we now have wooden chairs, patio sets, cafe sets, loungers and even our scratty deck chairs which we still love but are wary to sit on as they are so old.... to be honest its a bit overkill and e bay beckons for some of the less desirable less comfy seats. 

now we are enjoying a bit of cooler weather and watching wild storms from the comfort of inside.  no need to water the garden and I hope the frogs are loving it. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scotland part 2

The second half of the week continued in much the same vein.  We had one rainy afternoon which was actually quite nice to be holed up in the house with the rain lashing the windows.  It probably wasn't quite so nice for the two visitors that came on their bikes but they're tough cookies - and its only water- but I did feel sorry for them having to cycle six miles back down the track in the wind and rain, but given Scotland,  it wasn't as bad as it could be. The big quest for the 2nd half of the week was to find some deer antiers!  The chap that owned the house dropped in to visit - he was a very friendly fella and was chatting about how this was the time of year when all the Stags lost their antlers (he collected them and sold them) so after that we were on the serious lookout.   It's always been Fred's mission to find some dropped antlers....  The Monro baggers continued with the mission to bag the remaining three Monros... there is discussion as whet...
Post a Comment
Read more

Vigo

We left the ship to explore Vigo. Its a much larger place then we expected... although tbh I hadn't given ut a lot of thought. Its a real mish mash of old and new and having got a map from tourist info we decided to follow the walking trail to the Monte Castro... the highest point of the town.  Most of the town was pretty much as everywhere else... lots of traffic... lots of people... one or two interesting buildings and a lot of shopping. We headed to the art gallery - this has been a year of gallery visits so we we seen o reason to change now.  The Museo de Marco is housed in the towns ex prison building and its very grand. In fact, I think that on this occaision the building might have been more interesting than the art....  Although the visiting exhibition by Susanne S D Themlitz was strangely compelling. It was a huge varied collection of eclectic items... found, salavaged, manipulated and arranged in lots of ways - weirdly inspiring - and mostly enjoyable to look at...
2 comments
Read more

Funchal

So after three days at sea we finally hit Funchal in Madeira.  An escape from the ship, and I have to say it was very pleasant indeed.  First of all the weather is really splendid.  Especially when you know that everybody else in the UK is suffering grim storms and vile winds..  Over here it is between 22 and 25 degrees is really quite warm.    Funchal is a pretty city. It's built on a hill it with lots of lovely white houses with stunning red roofs.   In order to get the best of it we walked along the sea front until we got to the cable car and we took it up the hill.  It was a really good ride much longer than we imagined and it's quite weird because it goes right through the town -  completely over everybody's house...  So not only do you get a lovely vista of the bay but you can view the beautiful rooftops and get to look in everybody's gardens and to look at their picnic sets.. clean washing nice plants... scratty b...
2 comments
Read more