This time last year I downloaded an app called Top 9 which selects the best (not sure by what criteria) nine photos posted on Instagram during the previous year. I’m seeing a few people posting their Top 9 so I decided I’d revisit it. Unfortunately the app doesn’t want to play ball, just hanging and displaying the message “Doing some housekeeping …”. Its been doing … Continue reading My top 10 from 2020
A blissful midsummer’s weekend celebrating the best in garden writing I can’t remember when I first heard about the Garden Museum. I’ve been to a few of their wonderful events over the years, have supported Christopher Woodward’s sterling fund-raising efforts for development, and have become rather fond of the organisation and everything it stands for. One day, when I was clearly in the mood to treat … Continue reading The Garden Museum Literary Festival – a long weekend in Norfolk Part 1
For a number of reasons spirits have been sinking lower and lower. A voluntary task was becoming a seriously unsustainable burden. Work was ramping up in pressure (albeit exactly as expected as moving into a busy time). An unforeseeable crisis caused stress and heartache which isn’t going to go away. Capacity was at full stretch, I’d worked all through last weekend and many evenings over … Continue reading A winter walk at Wakehurst Place
There is a beautiful sense of counterpoint to our dual lives, each strand differing from, yet complementing, the other. Our lives in West Sussex are lived in a tiny modern house with a garden smaller than most people’s pools in south-west France. So we tend to go out garden visiting (Garden Bothering?) at the weekends when based in Sussex. Sometimes we will visit an NGS garden, … Continue reading Parham House Harvest Fair: a gloriously sunny day in West Sussex
Three summers ago while on holiday in the Dordogne with friends, before we thought of buying a property in France, we visited the gardens at Château de Marqueyssac, one of France’s Jardins Remarquable. I had read about the gardens, and seen Joe Swift’s * feature on Gardener’s World in October 2011, and determined that we must go. So the opportunity was perfect. Situated on a cliff … Continue reading Inspirations: Château de Marqueyssac
The Renaissance Gardener 