The garden has its hat on – a hat of snow.
Plants are sporting their new white headgear.
All sculptures and ornaments are wearing their ermine hats and coats.
The insects are warm in their homes, hopefully hibernating safely, but we will not know until the spring. Each night the little Jenny Wrens queue up to roost in their wicker basket.
Sometimes things happen in life that make you ask hugely important questions, life-changing in fact. Today as we drove to the local garden centre we saw these characters waiting at a bus stop. I had to stop and snap up a photo. And this experience brought one of these massive questions to the fore.
Do snowmen travel by bus?
Sadly, the character on the left got fed up of waiting and fell asleep.
In the first few months of each new year the garden treats us to a colourful show of bright and varied coloured stems of shrubs. The most colourful are the dogwoods and willows of which we grow several specially chosen for their coloured stems. They glow in any bright days at this time of year.
This selection of stems cut from our garden include dogwood, Kerria, willow, bamboo and Winter Jasmine.
The first pair of photos shows Cornus, the first is “Midwinter Fire” which we grow alongside our summerhouse just where it gets backlit by the winter sun, the second is “Cardinal” of which we have several specimens around the garden as they look good in any light.
Below is neither a dogwood or willow but an extremely red stemmed Acer called “Sango Kaku”, which we have planted alongside Cornus “Midwinter Fire”. We look forward to seeing them grow together.
The Cardinals in our front garden grow in front of our White-stemmed Birch, Betula utilis “Silver Queen”.
We keep adding shrubs with coloured stems and yesterday I took these cuttings below off gardening friend Pete’s fiery willow.
Sometimes the coloured stems are made even more special with the addition of flowers. The willow below with its black stems glow with the emergence of its white flowers at this time of year.
I shall finish with the photo of a bunch of stems cut from our bamboos.
In the last few weeks of last year we harvested two plants that we have rarely harvested before but for very different reasons.
The first crop came from the greenhouse where the plants had been growing away all summer in growing bags after being sown in the propagator early in the spring. We were given the seeds and having never tried them before we decided to give them a go. Tomatillos – the name sounding somewhat like tomatoes and the plants and fruit ending up looking somewhat like cape gooseberries.
Here is the crop, now we had to decide what to do with them. Chutney seemed to be the only answer, but I decided to turn to Google for ideas and perhaps if we were lucky, recipes.
And here they are closer up, thin pale green papery sheaths around fruit like green tomatoes. They didn’t look ready to harvest but we had heard somewhere that this is the stage to pick them and as the plants were suffering as temperatures cooled down, we went ahead and plucked them from the stems.
O.K. Back from a Googling session and I now knew that the botanic name for tomatillo is Physalis philadelphica, which makes it a relative of the Cape Gooseberry and a member of the Nightshade family. It originates from South America. In Mexico it is a staple food of the diet and is often used to make green sauces. Here they are called “Tomate Verde” and are most appreciated for their green colouring and sharp taste.
I found recipes for soups, stews, salsas and yes, chutney.
The second “odd” crop is bamboo, odd because it doesn’t often seem to be grown in the uk for anything but decorative reasons and because it is the first time we have seriously harvested our bamboo to use as garden canes. We grow three different bamboos for their different stem colours and originally planted them for their ornamental value, tall and graceful, moving gently adding sound to quiet days.
Growing your own garden canes is a good way of helping the environment. Importing them from China seems a terrible waste of resources.
It was mostly the black stemmed variety that was ready this year. Their stems are tough so I struggled with secateurs before turning to a pair of nicely sharpened loppers and getting the job done. The range of colours is very wide as the photos below shows.
Similarly we harvest our prunings, utilising the large shrubby ones for beanpoles and the scrubbier smaller ones for beansticks. We started to harvest these last week and will continue as we sort out the garden in readiness for the coming growing season.
Peas and beans seem to like to twine themselves around these rougher sticks and poles in preference to the bamboos available in garden centres. And of course we must remember they are self-sustaining, so there is no cost to the environment.
Back to some Shropshire architecture for this posting as promised. At the back-end of 2012 I posted a couple of articles based around the market town of Ludlow after being challenged by some followers to feature architecture photos. So here is another batch of posts on the architecture of Shropshire.
Just ten minutes up the road we find the county town of Shropshire. It is not a large town but its ambition is to become a city. Shrewsbury is famous for its historical buildings, for being the birthplace of Charles Darwin and for being the friendliest, most well-mannered town in England.
We don’t go into our shire capital often for the usual reason ie shopping. We avoid shopping whenever we can and try even harder to avoid shopping in town centres. Too much noise, too many people, too much traffic!
But we love Shrewsbury for its buildings and the entertainment it provides for us. Theatre, cinema, jazz club and coffee houses.
This series of posts feature the buildings of our town. They will not follow a chronological order but we shall explore streets, alleys and lanes in bite-sized chunks of town, chunks just the right size to explore in a half day. It would be all too easy and obvious to present the architecture in historical order but I really want to give you the atmosphere of patches of the town. Sometimes the selected areas will seem random but that is how my mind works.
The starting point for today’s random collection of buildings is the coffee shop in Marks and Spencers. After a latte (Malc) and cappuccino (Jude), we are suitably refreshed and warmed up.
First stop is the school attended by Charles Darwin, where we find a big, bronze statue of the great man himself sat outside, while inside on one of the windowsills is the scratched signature of his brother. The building now houses the town’s public library and this famous graffiti is in between the book cases. Darwin is often described as the town’s most famous son, but he is more than that. The most intelligent person ever to have lived for example?
The building displays interesting detail in its stonework and a wonderful big sundial with two faces sits astride the one corner.
The cobbled lane leading to the library is overlooked by an interesting row of town houses and a beautiful gateway.
We walked on down Castle Street towards one of Shrewsbury’s most photographed buildings. It appears in many books about railways and about the Victorian era. The railway station. How can a railway station look so good?
To the left of the station forecourt we spotted a real “Mary Poppins” balustraded roof garden constructed in wonderful shades of red.
From the railway station we see hints of the castle, so we made our way towards it.
As we walked around this small corner of Shrewsbury town little details attracted my eye and my camera lens.
We always seem to walk over hill and moor country on cold days. Even back in the Autumn we found ourselves choosing a cold day to journey down to the Brecon Beacons in Carmthenshire for a moorland amble. The Brecons are an upland area of Wales that we tend to drive through but rarely visit so this was our chance to discover its landscape and wildlife.
As we set out on our walk the sky looked threatening.
With each step we took up the gently slopes the temperature dropped and the wind got stronger. Around us the bracken had been cut, perhaps to reduce its dominance on the landscape and let other species come through. It seems that wherever there are too many sheep grazing such areas as this the bracken takes over as sheep do not eat it. An excess of bracken reduces biodiversity. Half way across this trimmed area of bracken we came across a flock of waders nervously feeding on the soft soil in the green grassed areas between the rust-coloured stripes. We moved slowly forward, binoculars in hands, desperately trying to work out what they were. Our first thought was Curlews but as we got closer we realised they were too small. Next idea that sprang to mind was Grey Plover which proved correct. they were obviously on the move to somewhere on the coast and had dropped in for shelter from the wind as it got stronger, for a rest and for nutrition. The soft soil would give easy access to creatures below the surface, for which they were probing with their long, strong bills.
The slow walk up the slope took us through wet areas and gave us varied views.
When we reached the highest point we stopped for a coffee break and froze! The biting wind stung our eyes and made them run, making tears run down our cheeks, and blew my hat away.
We were hoping the dry-stone wall would afford some shelter, but most of it had long fallen exposing a rough old fence of pig-wire and gnarled posts. After replenishing our spirits we followed the fence-line along the ridge. It is amazing how photogenic a tumbledown, weather-beaten fence can prove to be.
While having our break we watched Red Kite gracefully soaring overhead in search of carrion.
As we dropped back down the slope at the end of the old wall we were sheltered slightly and the wind was on our backs – much better!
On the lower slopes just above the car park we came across two interesting fungi, very different in habit but both deep yellow in colour.
So an exhilarating walk in exhilarating weather! We must return in more clement weather!
We awake each morning this week to frost which gives way to mist. As the day light increases, the drops of melted frost hang from plants like miniatures lanterns.
Please click on the first image in the gallery below and click the right arrow. The technical details are with each photograph.
What a loud noise a tine makes when it snaps off your fork! Yesterday I dug up the root of an old Rubus – it was tougher than I thought and certainly tougher than my fork wanted it to be.
Artefacts, ornaments, sculpture and collected objects all come to life with a coating of frost. When the garden takes on its bare look of winter these items gain extra significance . Some are completely hidden during the growing months and we can appreciate them anew as leaves fall and greenery dies down.
In “The Stumpery” in our front garden, which could well be the world’s smallest stumpery featuring only one stump, a rusted iron sculpture based on ferns is given new life when rimmed with frost.
In “The Beth Chatto Border” our sundial and terracotta oil jars are given extra texture detail with a cold white coating.
Lanterns hang throughout the garden some from arches and some on their own stands like shepherds’ crooks.
Chicken sculptures abound as you might expect!
And finally a look at a piece made in hammered sheet copper by our daughter, Jo. The frost hides its shine, intensifies its texture and calms its colours.
As a gardener I dislike the frost because it prevents me getting any tasks done but I love the way frost adds completely new character to the plants. The simplest bare stem or branch can come to life when the low sun catches a rim of frost.
As a photographer I dislike the frost as it makes my fingers hurt with cold deep down into the joints but I love the way light and frost adds a magical element not present at any other time. I find my fingerless thermal gloves a great help.
Grasses, when frosted create line drawings. My eye and camera lens are drawn to them on every frosty day.
Looking out into the garden on bright frosted days, the low morning light creates special moments as it catches the seed heads of perennials.
In our frosted garden artefacts, ornaments and objects take on a new life. The copper obelisk looks black against the whiteness and it sports a delicate white coating. My next post will be about others.
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