8 JULY 2009

There was a thunderstorm last night, with torrential rain.   The dogs, who hate thunder, hot-footed it into our bedroom at the first rumble, and were allowed on to the bed. Mary followed shortly afterwards and everyone went back to sleep apart from me.  But I didn’t mind at all; in fact it felt good to be tucked up in the warm and dry, listening to their breathing and the rain drumming on the roof. Time was, before the building work, when I’d have to be creeping round the house on leak patrol, putting pans and buckets in strategic places.  I lay here and thought of one of my favourite poems, WHO LOVES THE RAIN, introduced to me by Susan on her lovely High Desert Home blog.

WHO LOVES THE RAIN
By Frances Shaw
“Who loves the rain
And loves his home,
And looks on life with quiet eyes,
Him will I follow through the storm;
And at his hearth-fire keep me warm;
Nor hell nor heaven shall that soul surprise,
Who loves the rain,
And loves his home,
And looks on life with quiet eyes.”

I particularly loved this rainfall because we had been needing it for so long, and when it was time to get up, I wandered outside to find the garden lush and green and quenched.

There is something magical about gardens wet with rain.  There’s that astonishing Van Morrison song In the Garden, where he remembers…

“When I saw you standin’
Standin’ in the garden
In the garden

Wet with rain

You wiped the teardrops from your eye in sorrow
And we watched the petals fall down to the ground
And as I sat beside you I felt the
Great sadness that day

In the garden”.

And then there is the lovely Morning has Broken, whether crooned by Cat Stevens or sung by a church choir:

“Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dewfall, on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass.

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God’s recreation of the new day”.

Life goes on…. and thank goodness for that.

At Hampton Court Flower Show on Monday I saw another kind of rainy garden: an award-winning display garden called The Rain Chain, designed by Wendy Allen, which featured rainwater harvesting from a green roof via a gutter and “rain chain” leading into a sculptural metal water butt and overflowing into a sunken “rain garden” where excess water can soak away naturally.

This is an idea I’ve been interested in ever since reading Nigel Dunnett and Andy Clayden’s brillant Rain Gardens book a few years ago (published by Timber Press).  The intention is to harvest and store water during times of heavy rain for use during drought, while also helping to prevent flash-flooding.  All surfaces are permeable, and plants are chosen for their ability to tolerate short periods of both waterlogging and drought.  I particularly like the rain chain itself – rather than channel the rainwater down an ugly plastic pipe unseen, it is sent dancing down a metal chain – and the splashy sound effects only add to the enjoyment.

I like the look of this, with its rusty metal water butt and grassy plantings.  I recently saw another example, at a garden in Kent I was writing about, with the chic-est tidiest shed imaginable – see the chain flowing from the custom-made galvanized metal gutters into an old florist’s bucket (strictly speaking there should then be an overflow into something else – a “storm garden” planter or a ditch (some resemble a dry river bed in dry periods) leading to a pond or sump, or if necessary straight into the main drain).

I’m told there is also one at the Bernard Leach Pottery Studios in Cornwall. Originating in Japan and popularised in recent years in rain-ridden Oregon in the United States, I have a strong feeling that rain chains will become much more popular in years to come.

After all, it is possible to love the rain even more if one knows it is being collected up for use in drier times ahead.

Enjoy the rain everyone, should you be lucky enough to have some.  And love your homes….

For background information about our project to turn a pair of derelict Victorian railway carriages into an eco-home, plus more garden writing, other journalism and information on my past, current and forthcoming books, please visit my website.

4 JULY 2009

MARGARET ESME THOMPSON

21 MAY 1934 – 1 JULY 2009

This post is dedicated to my Mother, who died early Wednesday morning.

I write this lying beneath a beautiful blue and white patchwork quilt my Mother made for me in 1990 – one of the many, many lovely things in our house that she has made throughout the years.  As children, my sisters and I were often dressed in matching cotton dresses she sewed for us, and cardigans that she knitted.  She even made us little tweed coats with velvet collars like those you see photographs of the Queen and Princess Margaret wearing as girls – goodness knows how difficult these must have been to make, when she was working as a teacher too – and there was even a crocheted bathing suit which we still laugh about (it looked fine while dry but became so heavy and waterlogged when wet that it sagged way down one’s legs…). When  I went off to University in 1980 I took with me a patchwork quilt that had my father’s old plaid farming shirts as the central pieces, surrounded by more recent fragments of our family life – summer school uniforms, old prize-day dresses, the inevitable ubiquitous Laura Ashley florals….  (My Mother had stopped work on the quilt when my father, shortly after their marriage, had remarked that he did not care for patchwork, but had taken it up again a few decades later when, though still happily married, his opinion on such things seemed to have less weight….) All through those heady early Cambridge days, that quilt reminded me of my roots.

My Homemade book is dedicated to my Mother, and I am so glad that she saw this book published and liked it enough to give many copies to her own friends.   All through her life she was making things with love, from cards she would stitch and stick and keep in a drawer ready to send with well-chosen words and loving messages to the lovely little Liberty print dresses she made for my daughter Mary – two for every season – ever since she was a year old.

Mary also sleeps beneath patchwork quilts Ma made for her, pouring love and prayers into every stitch even before she was born, and has a doll, Milly, who was knitted by Mum and a pair of bears whose wardrobe of clothes for every occasion was always being added to by Mum with a new pair of pyjamas or a party dress. When we went to visit, there were always delicious meals and homemade cakes – often Mary’s favourite cup cakes with white icing and a glace cherry on top. Ma was happiest in her sewing room at the top of the stairs, or in the kitchen, cooking for friends and family and church functions.

These images from the Homemade book are a homage to my Mother: as well as Mary’s little dresses there is one of her homemade cards, and many of the eggs on the Easter egg tree were made by her.   She was especially pleased that one of the close-up pictures featured an egg that her own mother, who died in 1982, had painted, making the book a celebration of the work of three generations of our family, alongside all my friend Ros’s wonderful creations.

I don’t often put such personal stuff up on this blog, and if later it does not feel right, I might remove it.  But I can’t really write about anything else this week – and it sort of feels right. So Mother, this one is for you, with all my love.

For background on our project to turn a pair of dilapidated Victorian railway carriages into an eco home, my garden writing, other journalism and information on my past and current books, please visit my website.

25 JUNE 2009

Happy sunny days. There has been much time spent at the beach, walking the dogs and paddling at low tide, or swimming out to where the sky and sea meet in a merging of limpid blues….

The evenings seem to stretch on for ever, and Mary and I often take a bike ride after supper, dogs running along behind, with our pudding in Mary’s little bike bag, to eat in a grassy sheltered grassy spot alongside the sea.

When the light begins to change, we go home – and often all flop out on our various beds at the same time.

The house is feeling more and more lived in – and I’m winning my battle against clutter, with a lot of under bed storage and some ruthless throwing out.  The atmosphere is mostly peaceful, particularly in the mornings and early evenings, when golden light illuminates all it falls on.

Outside,the raised vegetable beds are continuing to fill out, supplying us with radishes, rocket, spring onions, a few early courgettes and two large home-grown salads every day.

We’ve recently sown dwarf french beans in one corner and they are already up, nudging through the soil and opening in the sun, their heart-shaped leaves unfurling and hanging up as if to dry.  Another corner has a repeat sowing of cut-and-come-again varieties of lettuce – to take over from the wildly successful red and green cut-and-come-again mix I was sent from Crocus.

The rows on the diagonal are not merely anal, I swear – though they DO look pretty, as I think you’d agree…. They are also a good way of ensuring you have plenty of your favourite vegetables and less of things you may not like so much – and extra or spare seedlings can easily be popped in as a short row at either end.  One bed has been given over almost entirely to courgettes, interspersed with several sorts of nasturtiums, and I’ve also sown a row of white cosmos and another of old-fashioned pot-marigolds – partly because I like them, partly to use as cut flowers and partly to encourage more bees into the little kitchen garden.  Next year I very much hope to have a hive or two to produce our own honey….

What we have been producing, along with vats full of elderflower cordial (which I wrote about here), is rose petal syrup from the amazingly full and fragrant flowers of the Rosa rugosa ‘Roseraie de la Hay’ that flanks our front gate.  The other day there were a good dozen flowers on it which were about to blow their blowsy bright pink petals all at once upon the ground.  Remembering a recipe I’d copied down years ago, I pre-empted nature and did a spot of pre-dead heading into a bowl.

I boiled up some sugar syrup using the same volume of water as the rose petals, loosely packed, and half that of caster sugar, with the juice of half a lemon added and, when this was still quite warm, poured it over the rose petals.  They seemed to surrender their colour almost immediately, turning the syrup deep deep pink, and filling the air with their fragrance.

I left it all to steep, covered, in a cool place overnight, and then strained through muslin and poured into little jars to give as presents or pour over vanilla icecream.  It really is like essence of roses – and I’m tempted to try to make rose creams, my mother’s favourite sweet.  The colour and scent of my Rosa rugosa are particularly strong; I have yet to try making rose syrup with any other type of rose, but the flavours and hues would vary considerably.

As for work on the garden, no sooner had I got the front of the house looking pretty than the guys from the Hastings Recyling Wood project arrived to help me construct the low beds I’ve been wanting around the deck and to either side of the front steps.  The idea is to use old sea defence wood the same chunky thickness of the steps to retain the soil – about 2ft in depth – and fill it with a mix of “see-through” diaphanous planting such as wispy grasses, feathery Gaura lindheimeri, Verbena bonariensis, Thalictrum delavayi with its clouds of tiny purple florets, the odd eryngium and echium – things that will enjoy the sun and well-drained (stony) soil we have down here.  This will not only hide the edges of the deck (always ugly, no matter how well constructed) but will also disguise the concrete base on which the railway carriages and new extensions rest.  My vision is for the entire construction to seem to be emerging from a shifting, shimmering fringe of flowers and grasses….

From the deck steps, the bed will wrap around the deck, passing around the apple tree and along to the front door – this stretch seen above will have a further length of wood along the middle, creating a two-tier bed which will become shingle steps just to the left of the water butt.  It will then neatly meet the similar timber we have used for the front steps (the next job is to get the spirit level out and secure the lengths of wood into their final positions) and on the other side of them create new beds hugging the perimeter of the house right round to the verandah.  If this does not make sense, I hope to have pictorial updates before too long.  It’s the perfect time to be planting grasses, gaura and other late-summer plants – and there will be space to tuck in some spring flowering bulbs in autumn. It will be my first bit of “proper” planting here and I have been scribbling lists with great enthusiasm.  I’m not much good at “before” pictures, so will just leave you with this – dead heads on the pinks and all – as I love the colours, and the fact that Mary is showing great horticultural promise and good taste by deciding of her own accord to start a collection of pinks.

For more on the background of our project to turn two old Victorian railway carriages into an eco home, plus photographs, journalism and more of my garden writing and books, please visit my website.