Category: Garden

Best Friends?

It rained a lot last night, but the damned pigeons have been sitting in the rain gauge again and blocked it with their crap.
A1 is rereading Ghostwritten by the splendid David Mitchell, a welcome change after the recent run of humdrum books. Rereading DM is always worthwhile, with shared characters and previously undetected links between novels becoming apparent.
A2 is reading Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan which is also humdrum.

Olive Blossom

A rain drop dangles from the tiny flowers, containing an image of a trellis and a piece of a tomato plant. We had roast pork and a reprise of the lovely strawberry cream rice pudding for our family dinner and scored a disappointing 8.5 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading City of Sinners by AA Dhand, who still has it in for Bradford. A2 is reading Hunted by Abir Mukherjee.

Flowers in the Rain

The first passion flowers of summer.
We had fishcakes and peach cakes for our family dinner and did this week’s and last week’s quizzes, scoring 10.5 on one and 8.5 on the other.
A1 is reading The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson. A2 is reading The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks; back in Victorian times, the Trans-Siberian Railway travels through a burgeoning, evolving, threatening landscape in the style of Jeff Vandermeer.

Flower of the Day: Tree Peony

We have had this lovely plant for a few years and each year it has had a maximum of one flower which is soon destroyed by wind/snails/squirrels. This year it has three. Onward and upward!
A1 is reading Eight Detectives* by Alex Pavesi, a kind of thought experiment in crime fiction: a collection of short stories by a fictional author embodying the various plots available to a crime writer, and enclosed in  another mystery … and all is not as it seems. Very meta. Readable, but not wholly successful.

May Day

The garden after the second coldest, third wettest and fourth least sunny April on our records, though yesterday was our warmest (20.1 °C) and sunniest (11.218kWh) day this year before the mist and clouds rolled in again. And the bluebells have overtaken the tulips once again, the magnolias are over, the foxgloves are gone but the apples are blossoming like crazy.
A1 is reading The Spy by Ajay Chowdhury. A2 is rereading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, which took ten days to read because it is so full of crunchy goodness.

Second Spring


The warm weather has filled our garden with a second showing of poppies, cornflowers, magnolias, rhododendrons and millions of passion flowers but the cool and rainy days (25.5 mm yesterday) have returned.
A1 is reading Holly by Stephen King. This is SK’s COVID novel, featuring his well-drawn private eye heroine Holly Gibney. Full of ire about Trump, COVID conspiracy theories and medical pseudoscience — “She didn’t die of COVID, she died of stupidity” — it’s an enthralling look at how the US citizenry reacted to the pandemic.
A2 is reading Death of a Lesser God by Vaseem Khan (thx A1).

Excess of Passion

Just a few of the hundreds of passion flowers that are growing all over our wall.
Admin1 is reading The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, a highly convoluted and (self-acknowledgedly) Dickensian tale of lost inheritance, mysterious (and fake)  cartomancy, decades-long lawsuits and a family at war with — and in love with — itself. The complexity and narrative unreliability increases for the first two-thirds of the book, but the hard work pays off handsomely in the final third. A difficult read in places (the included family tree is helpful), but very much worth it. Thanks Admin2!

Pop-up Poppies

Since the replacement of our back garden hedging with a fence, a number of these plants have shot up in the disturbed soil. They appear to be Papaver somniferum, otherwise known as opium poppies.
Today was our second ever sunniest day for the solar panels (13.430kWh), and the recent run of good weather means it’s on the 7-day sequence records.
Admin2 is reading Wilful Behaviour by Donna Leon.

Adam and Eve

Yesterday the lovely Dave came round and cleared up a bit of our garden including this invasive, poisonous and highly suggestive Arum maculatum (aka snakeshead, adder’s root, arum, wild arum, arum lily, lords-and-ladies, devils and angels, cows and bulls, cuckoo-pint, soldiers diddies, priest’s pintle, Adam and Eve, bobbins, naked girls, naked boys, starch-root, wake robin, friar’s cowl, sonsie-give-us-your-hand, jack in the pulpit and cheese and toast). Today the lovely Dave and family came for tea of roast beef, air-fried pigs in blankets, roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, stuffing balls, broccoli, carrots and peas with parkin for afters. We scored 11 (rounded up) on the GSQ. Our other visitor today was a stupid pigeon which hopped into our house and started eating the cat food, then hid in a corner and took ages to chase outside again.

First Poppy

A marker of the changing seasons.
Admin1 is rereading Lamentation by CJ Sansom. Admin2 is reading Midnight at Malabar House by Vaseem Khan. Malabar House, like Slough House, the Peculiar Crimes Unit and Department Q is a holding pen where misfit investigators are shuffled out of sight; and investigation takes a back seat — there is so much (interesting) Indian history, geography, theology, politics and sociology on show that the plot just fits in the gaps between disquisitions.

April Showers Bring May Flowers

The garden after an April that was cooler and wetter than the last couple of Aprils and had absolutely average sunshine. Bluebells up, tulips down, magnolias still going, poppies in abeyance, foxgloves nonexistent and the cool black tulips hidden behind all the other stuff. Admin2 mowed the lawn but it sprung back up again. It’s now No-mow May so go, go grass!
Admin1 is rereading Dissolution by CJ Sansom. Admin2 is rereading The Extremes by Christopher Priest; tldr: VRSF.