Everything in the Garden

Metaphorically ~ Everything in the Garden is not yet lovely; but I am optimistic. The Local Government Ombudsman's Investigator has written that he has received "initial comments" from Dorset County Council social services and will keep me informed. Well, I am quite happy to let it ride for the time being. It is good not to have to do anything just now, about social services' delays to disabled facilities and adaptations. I haven't fallen recently, just a few minor stumbles, its warm indoors and out, so pain and stiffness is slightly less. I have not had to engage in written correspondence with anyone official for a few weeks, so I am content. I am calm, relaxed even, which is a pleasurable place to be.

Literally, now everything in the garden is lovely and it is warm and sunny, 25 degrees C and clear blue skies. The leaves pictured above were picked in the grounds of Kingston Lacy last week, and not photographed but the live leaves arranged and placed on the scanner and sent straight to my laptop. Literally life size on your screen. I don't yet have a digital camera, so this is my current favourite option.

I have been reading Medieval Gardens by Anne Jennings*; lots of pictures from medieval illustrations, and quotations. Bartholomew de Granville wrote in the 13th century:

For trees move not wilfully from place to place as beasts do;
neither change appetite and liking, nor feel sorrow ...

He was describing the difference between plants and animals ! The view below of Kingston Lacy house is very familiar and I have done many pencil sketches of the magnificent cedar with the white circular seat around its base and the house in the background (the tricky architectural detail variously hidden by branches). Last week it looked different - had it moved ? The tree with the seat around was different. Took me a while to realise; they had moved the white circular seat to be around another tree close by, so the original cedar must be getting wider as well as taller.

Kingston Lacy, Dorset - National Trust

I know how it feels (width not height). Its summer - I eat lots of fruit and healthy raw vegetable salads, but sitting outside in the shade with a pot of Early Grey, has to be accompanied by cake ! I am good: clotted cream on my scones only once this summer.

My garden is very green and lush, as it has been raining since May and only stopped last week. Paul who cuts my grass (and who is a straw bale building consultant) struggled to make it wheelchair friendly last week, but it looks more chopped than mown. No matter. Usually at this time towards the end of summer it is sparse and more brown than green; but together with the cut hay meadow beyond, is unseasonally but pleasurably green. Hugh of Fouilloy (c 1132-1152) wrote:

The green turf which is in the middle of the material cloister refreshes encloistered eyes and their (the monks) desire to study returns.

It is truly the nature of the colour green that it nourishes the eye and preserves the vision.

Paul, who has been keeping my garden under some control for almost fifteen years, is a very interesting man, and often has fascinating nuggets to share. This week he reported seeing two ravens on his land , which is on the slope of one of the great Dorset hills, and commented that a few years ago a raven was captured from that hill and taken to the Tower of London. There to have its wings clipped (as all the Tower ravens have) so that it might extend the breeding stock of Tower ravens. Imagine how the raven must have felt - one minute minding its own business, sailing along in the thermals admiring its birds-eye view of the Dorset landscape, then netted; wings clipped, incarcerated in the Tower for no good reason (such as treason or other fellony) and expected to perform.

http://www.toweroflondontour.com/beauchmp.html

This wet summer is not kind to those who rely on the the seasons to perform in the expected way. Paul's plan to import mature olive trees in response to recent hotter dryer summers, has not got off the ground this year. Maybe next year. We all hope. A friend, who is almost self sufficient in vegetables, has lost her crop of Pink Fir Apple potatoes to blight, even though she grows them in raised beds and many others have reported their problems with courgettes and tomatoes. My Bump's Plum trees are laden though and the blackberries in the overgrown bit of my garden look promising, but others' runner beans are either heavy cropping or slow to get going and flower due to the cold and wet. I am glad that this year I did not sow and have planted (by Paul) my usual row of runner beans - I would not have been able to get the wheelchair onto the soggy garden to tie in the young growths. I decided in March not to sow runner beans this year (which is the only vegetable growing I can manage these days) as I truly thought that, after five year's delay, surely this spring building work would begin for adaptations. In April it became obvious that the delays were continuing, hence my request to the LGO to investigate Dorset County Council' social services department delays.

All Enjoyers of gardens in soggy England hope that autumn is postponed by a late summer of gentle September days. But already there is a change; this morning I was awake unusually early, and at a 6.30 am a thick white mist, lit from above by the already risen sun, shrouded the garden beyond a few metres. As the sun burnt it off, the first of the autumn coloured dry leaves fell from the twin trunked ash tree just the other side of my garden boundary, a tree that appears on Ordnance Survey maps from over a hundred years ago.

It is too soon yet to be thinking of autumn. I am just beginning to enjoy the summer.

(* Medieval Gardens - Anne Jennings - Published by English Heritage ISBN 1-80574-903-5)