I’ve been busy with visitors this week – very happily so – and we have more on the way, so this will be a short post. The house has been a hive of activity, with Mary and I baking Easter cakes and biscuits, blowing and decorating eggs, making Easter cards and putting the finishing touches to the Simnel cake – favourite job for Mary being placing the Cadbury’s creme egg inside a yellow knitted chicken made specially for the purpose by my mother and perching her on top of a twiggy chocolate and Allbran nest that crowns the cake.
My best bit is, as always, hanging the decorated eggs on the tree. We made about six more this year, including some gorgeous duck-egg blue eggs from our local butchers, which we painted in different patterns, and several little quails eggs with markings so pretty that they don’t need extra decoration. The above pictures are of our house in London last Easter, showing one of the many projects my friend Ros Badger and I photographed for our forthcoming book, Homemade: Gorgeous Things to Make with Love (details in side bar), which is out on 5 May. (There is an extract in The Times Magazine today, 11 April. ) I’ll leave you with a few more seasonal photographs from the book, all taken by Ros’s partner, Ben Murphy: this ‘Pin the Egg on the Chicken’ banner painted by our friend the artist Mary Mathieson….
… and this painted Easter trug, again planted up in my garden, using some of the many dark-leafed violets that self-seed in pots and borders.
Inspired by the memory of the above, and the reading of a story in ‘Milly Molly Mandy’ last night, Mary and I are planning on making an Easter garden – complete with rocky cave with the boulder rolled away, and lolly stick crosses – to have on the kitchen table. I used to love making these as a child myself, and have written about a beautiful latterday version (in my Sunday Telegraph column for Easter Sunday) consisting of wooden seedboxes planted with wildflowers on the windowsills of the late Dame Miriam Rothschild’s house at Ashton Wold near Peterborough. A very happy and peaceful Easter to you all.
For more on our project to turn two Victorian railway carriages into an eco-house, more photographs, articles, garden writing and books, please visit my website.
The paperback edition of 
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Oh Elspeth – what wonderful pics!! I am sooooooo looking forward to the new book! Hope you have a great time with all the visitors and a truly happy Easter season!! Boo x
You have just triggered so many memories! I’ve been in Italy far too long…how could I have forgotton to introduce my daughter to Milly Molly Mandy ( and now I remember tho mouthwatering jacket potatos MMM cooked)…and help her make little rock gardens with mossy lawns adn secret caves!
Things that I did as a child that have slid to the far recesses of my brain. I think that I must order your book, it might help me along a bit!
Love the trug — Nick wooed me by sending one full of yellow flowers to my work on my 30th birthday. We still have it, and use it to bring plant gifts to friends, anxiously instructing them that they can keep the plants, but not the trug!
Ohhh — Milly Molly Mandy was one of my favourites. I always wanted to be an only child like her, living in a nice white cottage with a thatched roof and having the full attention of father and mother and uncle and aunty and Grandpa and Grandma.
Oh my that book will be on pre-order when the library opens tomorrow! Looks wonderful! LOVE that chicken banner! We did something similar for halloween – just not so pretty – pin the tail on the rat! http://kitschenpink.blogspot.com/2008/10/ghouls-giggles-and-general-mayhem.html
HA! Think I prefer yours! t.x
Milly Molly Mandy Forever. I just wish we could find white eggs to decorate. You can only get brown ones in the shops these days. I seem to remember using wax crayons as a resist for the ink. Happy Easter.
I too loved Milly-Molly-Mandy in her red and white striped dresses, and Mother with her 50′s aprons and hair in a bun.
As a child I usually spent Easter in the Lake District walking the fells with our extended family. We often would visit small churches and chapels and most would have some kind of minature Easter garden, green with moss, mirror ponds, palm crosses and paste jars of spring flowers, made by the Sunday School children. Thank you for bringing back vivid memories. Happy Easter!
Thanks, Fran, and others who have enthused about Milly Molly Mandy and miniature easter gardens… If I have time over next couple of days I shall post a picture of our own offering… A Happy Easter everyone!
xx E
Happy Easter and happy days.
Looks lovely. Lets hope book 2 gets commissioned.
XX
Hello Elspeth
I have long been a fan of your wonderful blog and once again you have delighted me with those lovely Easter photos. I follow your endeavours at Off the Rails with great interest and long may it continue..
I am the proud owner of a blog myself (as of this weekend!) and will be adding blogs I love to my site.
I hope you and the family enjoyed a very Happy Easter break.