January Blues.....and pinks and yellows!

This has been a very weird winter weatherwise so far - way too warm for starters, with temperatures into double figures.....not a thing I ever thought I'd hear myself wingeing about really, whereas at this time last year we were up to our knees in snow - literally!


These past 2 days have been the first cold, frosty days that we've had - and a bit of a shock to the system they've turned out to be too! But as a consequence of the warm, wet weather, an awful lot of flowers and blossom have gotten very confused and popped out early.

No snow (yet!) this year, but here are a few of the plants in bloom in my garden right now!

This azalea has been in flower since early November.


This ornamental cherry came into flower on Christmas Day - a whole 6 weeks early!


It's not quite as fullsome as usual, but still very pretty.


The Hellebores are about a fortnight early.


This little fellow shouldn't be out at all yet!


The heathers normally flower in mid-February.


This Hellebore doesn't usually put in an appearance until early February.


These usually pop out in March and last for months!


I don't know when this Willow 'Kilmarnoch' should go into bud as it was only planted in July (it was a Silver Wedding Anniversary present), but I wouldn't have thought it should be coming out now, should it?!


I've still got kale, spinach, chard, leeks, 2 sorts of cabbages, 2 types of broccolli and some sprouts going strong - and some self-set peas are about 2 inches high over by the greenhouse! The sharpe eyed amongst you may have spotted that I'm a mucky pup who failed to empty and clean the greenhouse in Autumn! :(

All our vegetables for Christmas dinner for 12 came out of our garden - and it made me ridiculously happy to do that!


The Garrya is glorious this year with the longest tasssles it's ever had but, again, somewhat earlier than usual.


And a new planting that hasn't yet bloomed (or shone) is my Christmas present from Himself, new lights for the drive! Ten years of complaining about how dark and scary our drive is at night have finally paid off. This pair of lights are about 50 yards from the road, about halfway up, and a single light is going in nearer the house....and Himself has promised to get them working before Easter! Naturally, being Himself, he's not doing it the easy way. He's got some complicated plan to tunnel under the drive rather than just dig a channel in the tarmac like everyone else would! :P
Frankly I don't mind HOW he gets the electrickery to the lights as long as he gets them working!!!


What's happening in your garden?

Who stole November?!

Now we all know that the Grinch stole Christmas, but I want to know who stole November? I had PLANS for November!
I was going to do posts on the reconvening of The Brown Earth Society, Autumnal vegetables, work in the garden, developments in the Japanese garden, the heron that nicked my fish, the renovations in the house and - most importantly, the completion of the Tea House at last. But then some heartless swine stole November when I wasn't looking and here we are at Christmas already and none of the above have got done!

So instead, all that remains is for me to wish each and every one of you a very Merry Christmas and a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.


Thank you all for reading my posts, leaving comments, making me laugh and becoming my friends ..... I'll be back in 2012 (with an extra month in it when I've found the stray November) with the as yet unwritten posts - hopefully! :)

Book Review - Sarah Raven's Wild Flowers

I recently recieved an email from a Senior Marketing Exec at Bloomsbury Books who had been rootling around on my blog (!) and "thought that you might want to hear about a book that we are publishing in October – Sarah Raven’s Wild Flowers." She also wondered if I'd be interested in "seeing a sample of the book, with a view to perhaps mentioning it on your blog, as a fresh angle for your readers? "

Well, not being one to miss out on doing something a bit different for you lot for a change (aren't I so good to you, eh?!), emails were swapped and it was agreed that I would review the book from the information on the sample providing that "I have the freedom to give a clear, open and totally honest review of the book as I see it?! ". So here it is.....

I duely awaited the arrival of said sample with excited anticipation whilst not being fully sure what a sample would consist of ..... would it be a whole chapter? just a few pages stapled together? a hefty wodge of the book perhaps?! I knew it wouldn't be the whole thing because: A) I was getting a sample! and: B) the book had been described to me as 'a whopper', but even so I have to confess that I was just a wee bit disappointed to recieve this:


An A2 sheet concertinaed down to A6 size.



When I opened it out there was a very pretty poster on the back, photographed by Jonathan Buckley - who took all the photos for the book. The 9 photos on the sampler are glorious and I have no reason to doubt that the others in the book will be equally as good. The photos are clear, sharply focused yet with wonderful slightly hazy backgrounds and depths of fields or, alternatively, the soft background greens of spring grass:




I had initially felt a bit let down by the size of the sampler, but I felt even more so when I looked at the information side of the sheet - as it only contained 4 examples of wild flowers and their descriptions....not much of a sample from a book of 500 wild flowers that is described as a 'lavish book' , 'a botanical marvel' and something that will be 'the most covetable flower book on the market'!!!



Anyway, once I'd got over being miffed at having to review the book from such a tiny sample (about 3 days later 'cos I can be a stroppy baggage at times!) and sat down to read it properly, I did quite enjoy what I read.



According to the (limited) information on the sampler, there are landscape photos throughout the book and a portrait of each plant to accompany each species description.



Two of the 4 extracts are shown below and you can click on them to enlarge them for reading:



I knew nothing about the Fly Orchid, except that I thought I vaguely recognised it from early summer walks out in Derbyshire, so this description of what it looks like and why, combined with where I might find it was useful and I felt I'd be far more able to spot Fly Orchids and to astound my companions with my depth of knowledge whilst on my wanderings in future!




I loved this photo but there was no description to go with it as the writing alongside the photo was too busy telling me what a perfect gift the book would make and how Sarah Raven has travelled the length and breadth of the British Isles to find these 500 "most breathtaking beautiful wild flowers".



Apparently she will be also presenting a 3-part BBC2 series about biodiversity and British wild flowers this Autumn - what a coincidence!




Mild sarcasm at marketing aside, the photos in the book are absolutely stunning, the species description write-ups are informative, clear and well laid out. Each one begins with a brief overview, then covers plant type, flowering period, height, description (very useful), companion species, distribution and habitat.



I did enjoy reading these 4 species descriptions as I only knew one of the four plants shown, although I didn't find them quite as captivating as the sampler blurb suggested I would, and I found the initial paragraph about the Wood Anemone a little bit twee as I don't go in for anthropomorphism in plants, but that's just me! I also found that as I didn't recognise the names of some of the companion species mentioned, I'd have to be flicking to and fro through the book to find the companions if I was using it in real life (as it were!)



But the book cover is pretty - even if it is somewhat predictably of bluebells:


....yet I was left feeling that as they had managed quite easily to get 2 photos and 2 species descriptions onto one A4 sized section of the sampler when the actual book itself is a nominal A4 size with a photo on one page and the species description on the facing page, then £50 for a large format hardbacked edition (yes...fifty quid!!!) and seventy five quid for a special slipcased edition was a hell of a lot to pay for some pretty pictures and a larger font that I could read without my glasses on!



I know it's meant to be a coffee table book and I know I adore wild flowers and would love to know more about them, but there is no way that I would cough up that amount of money for any book no matter how beautiful and informative it is! I didn't pay anywhere near that for my much loved and well used RHS 2 volume Garden Plant Encyclopaedia in a slipcase and that has vastly more than 500 plants in it!



Also Sarah's hefty tome is hardly a transportable little number, so you'd have to remember to either bring a bit of plant back with you (which I suspect is illegal for some plants anyway - not that I'd know without the book there though!) or to take your camera with you and then remember to take a photo of the plant and hope it came out clear and non-blurry enough to be able to identify the plant from...or is that just me and my photography skills?!



Having said all that though, if it ever comes out in a smaller, softbacked edition that would fit in the pocket of my rucksac so that I could have it to hand for when I spot the wild flowers when I'm out and about and, ideally, costs less than a tenner, then I'll be the first in the queue at WH Smiths but until then I'll just have to hope that our local library gets a couple of copies!!!



However, if money is burning a hole in your pocket or you've got some rich relative prepared to fork out the dosh for a cracking Christmas present that will indeed look very elegant on your coffee table (and may well have to stay there because it's too heavy to move), then this could be the book for you.



It was published on Monday, 17th October by Bloomsbury Books. The large format hardbacked edition is Wild Flowers, Sarah Raven



ISBN 978 1 4088 1394 2 480PP and is £50 ...or if you go onto Amazon it's down to £28.50 already..... looks like I'm not the only one that thinks it's too expensive then!

A quick Autumnal hotchpotch!

It's a jolly good job that I've got that 'Slow Blogger' label on my sidebar or I'd be chucked out of here for my lack of posts of late! Anyway, here's a quick roundup of what's going on in the garden at the moment......

Kale, spinach and rainbow chard are going at full pelt at the moment ...but the salad behind them has bolted somewhat!

No idea what sort of squashes these are as the foxes or badgers broke and nicked the labels when they ate the sweetcorn :(

Yesterday's pick of the crop - and, yes, we have still got a few Autumn raspberries left, but that's the last of the flagelot beans.

The sedum is lovely this year.

A closer look.

One of the Acers in the Japanese garden is begining to turn. It'll be a stunning deep red in about 2 more weeks.

No-one told my new water lily (Nymphaea 'Denver') that it shouldn't be flowering at this time of year. I guess the recent very warm weather confused it!

There are lots of berries everywhere this year - is this a harbinger of another hard winter?


The next post will be interesting - I hope! It's going to be a book review on a new wild flowers book that comes out next month......! :D

That's Proper Foreign!

......was the phrase heard as we gazed down from the plane over the vast expanse of scrub desert that is Morrocco. For the past few years we have got cold and wet holidaying in England and France - and France doesn't really count as 'abroad' because we know the language, we know the culture, we know the way it all works and we know how cold the rain can be! So it was decided that to celebrate our Silver Wedding anniversary, we would have a family holiday somewhere different; hot, dry and 'proper foreign' for a change .... and Marrakech was certainly all those things!
So make yourself a cup of mint tea (or 'Morroccan Whisky' as the locals call it!), sit yourself down and join me in a whirlwind tour of Marrakech.

The hot dry air that slapped us in our faces as we left the plane at 7 o'clock at night was just the first of many suprises:
The traffic wasn't heavy, but it was interesting in its make up.....

Cars can't get down the narrow streets and alleyways of the Medina - the old town within the walls, so a man with a handcart trundled our bags to our guest house.

Some of the children that we talked with every day on our way in and out from our riad

We stayed in the wonderful Riad HadikaMaria, an 8 roomed guest house 10 minutes walk from the main Jemma El Fna square (or 3 hours and, eventually, the hire of one small boy as a guide to get you back on your first day!)

The courtyard gardens were beautiful.

The plunge pool was a joy when the temperature topped 40 degrees!

Our room...but, sadly, I never got serenaded by anyone under my balcony!

The rooftop terrace - the view was prettier at night as you couldn't see all the breezeblocks and satellite dishes!

The souk.

A tangle of narrow alleyways where you can buy anything and everything - for a price!

It's easy to get to get lost at first, but it's also easy to get the hang of the layout of the alleys once you dive in and get on with it. As most people are a bit wussy and tend to lurk round the main street, the further in you go, the quieter it gets and the chances of haggling down to a cheaper price are greater. A wonderful place!

We found possibly the world's largest padlock

Tassles - they just love tassles!I've never seen so many tassles, they were everywhere!

"Looking is free today!"

The best compliment that the shop keepers can give you is "You like Berber - strong! Bargain hard!"

Meet Nutty Gnome, Berber woman!

First-Born and Last-Born are also natural born Berber women! :D

"You want nice lamp? I sell you nice lamp - democratic price"?!

Never did find out what a democratic price was.

Last-Born the jewellery maker checking out the quality of the beads in her bead heaven.

*whispers* "You want spices? I sell you spices - I take you to my/my brother's/my sister's spice shop....best price...come, come!"

First-Born caught cumin-sniffing!

or you can go to the Dyers Market, a specific area within the souk, to see the yarn and fabrics being dyed - in vast vats of boiling water over roaring fires. How the men coped with the temperatures is beyond me!

....where we bought huge scarves at ridiculously cheap prices - mine was one of the blue ones you can see hanging up...and he showed us how to make it into a toureg turban - not quite sure I could do it again now though!

or check out the fresh produce.....

a bit like this kitten did!

Inside or outside everyone has something to sell

A little further away from the main square and souk the veg stalls were a bit more basic

-sometimes!

Nightime in the Jemma El Fna.

A vast almost empty square during the day, a busy, bustling, endlessly entertaining source of food and snake charmers at night.

All the stalls are the same price and serve pretty much the same food - tagines, couscous, kebabs, salads, chips(!), almost too much to choose from. You sit on benches at tressle tables with your 'Morrocan serviettes' (squares of paper!) and order your food from the multilingual staff. It's quick, it's cheap, it's generally hot from being cooked immediately and it's good!

It's worth running the gauntlet of the stalls just to hear the comments they come out with to entice you to their particular stall - hillarious!

"Come, come - cheaper than Tesco"," my stall not just any food...my stall M&S food", "lovely jubbly food", "Jamie Oliver eat here", "better than Asda price", " 'ave a butchers at what we got!", "bluuuuddy luuurvley food!" - how could we resist?

I'm guessing they watch British TV for all the food-related adverts then?!

So there you go. A brief tour of the heart of Marrakech - and I haven't even started on the mosaics, the carvings, the Majorelle Gardens, the Ozoud Cascades........! :)