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.