Veg Plotting

I've walked many miles over the holiday season and seldom does the view match my mood as perfectly as this graffiti did in the footpath tunnel under the local railway this year. It's not the most salubrious of places or views, but it's a sentiment I wish for us all in 2026. Happy New Year everyone, and here's to a peaceful 2026 for you and yours. I also hope we get to do more of what I saw on the opposite wall! 😊

  It's Apple Day, one of my favourite days of the year and what better way to celebrate than to tell you about my recent trip to Longney, where Gloucestershire Orchard Trust have 18 acres of apple orchard under their tender care. Here you'll find older orchards with some trees well over a century old, plus their newer plantings of around 94 Gloucestershire cultivars which have just acquired national plant collection status at Plant Heritage . The jury's out on the actual number as DNA testing has revealed at least one locally named variety is actually a more well known one: Ribston Pippin in this case. Don't worry, there are dozens there which definitely have their origins rooted firmly in Gloucestershire and their cultivation at Longney is vital to their continued presence and preservation. There were around 200 local varieties at one time and today it's around 100 still in existence. Steve Mason - the Trust's Curator - was our knowledgeable guide who invited ...

We're just back from a fortnight's cottage holiday in North Yorkshire, where the weather was a bit iffy but we still found plenty of places to enjoy ourselves with new discoveries amongst those already familiar to us. It also meant we could spend time with the Yorkshire branches of our family - now plural as our niece has settled down into her new home in Leeds. It wasn't all rain, there was still lots of sunshine and we often found rainbows gracing the valleys seen from our higher viewpoints. I feel my photo sums up quite a lot of the Yorkshire we found this time: dramatic skies with rainbows and pools of sunshine; brooding stone walls; and vegetation sliding into its more Autumnal clothes. This was the roadside scene close to Stump Cross Caverns, a welcome venue on a rainy day which we explored with UV light torches. There was space and time to breathe deeply and ponder recent dramatic turns in life, then return home refreshed and ready to face what's to come.

The Gromit Unleashed trail in Bristol is providing a lot of free fun and laugher in Bristol this summer and it was the perfect excuse to meet up with my Girls Night Out friends recently. We started off as colleagues 26 years ago, and now are firm friends, though it's rare to find so many of us together these days. Here we are with Wallace providing a stand-in for our one missing group member. This photo makes me so happy! The trail comprises 53 various Wallaces, Gromits, Feathers McGraw and Norbots spread over a wide area in and around Bristol with a few extra surprises along the way such as the roving labybird Gromit and a few items hidden around the Museum. It's great fun and don't we look fab!

I'm just back from an amazing train trip across Europe to Lake Garda in Italy. The alpine scenery along the way was breathtaking and it was great to have a ground level view of the mountains instead of the more familiar overhead one. NAH and I managed several refreshing swims in the Lake bobbing amongst the ducks, plus trips to Verona and Venice as well as ferry trips around the lake, which is huge. So huge, even a trip on the pictured cable car up Mount Baldo (the tallest mountain on the lake at 1760 metres) wasn't enough to take it all in. My heads still there, but I'll be back soon with more garden related stuff!

Just back from a fabulous week in Tenby - my first time there and it won't be the last. I went with my friend W and we rented a comfy apartment in the centre of town with views of the sea and the town walls. Plenty of walking, castles, dreaming, snoozing, feasting and exploring ensued. Our timing was perfect as we had the best of late April's weather - both warm and sunny. Highly recommended.

A day trip to Salisbury and a glorious find on our walk into town from the station in the shape of this fab Paddington bench. I'd forgotten that many of this design were placed around the country last year as publicity for the latest film Paddington in Peru . It was lovely to see the bench being used by this gentleman who generously gave his consent to be photographed. I hope Paddington also agreed! 🤣

It's been great to have some quality time on the patio this week culminating in yesterday's partial eclipse. With the live stream to hand, we had fun with our hastily made pinhole projector (a piece of card pierced with a paper clip), playing with the image on our hands, then NAH decided to carefully take a direct photo of the sun. 'That won't work', I said, and I was right... and wrong, with the sun behind its mackerel sky veil blazing forth as usual, but the camera lens flare revealing a perfect image of the sun bitten by the moon. * = I've had Midnight Oil's Earth and Sun and Moon on the brain all week; especially appropriate for yesterday's celestial event.

We had a lovely time at Avebury Manor 's sculpture exhibition on Saturday and my friend W  kindly sent me this jolly photo from the day afterwards. When I saw it I giggled at how my chosen outfit picked out the colours of the Orangutan sculpture we found dangling in one of the trees, so it just had to be added to my irregular  series,  Separated at Birth today. I'm giggling again at how appropriate the series name is for this particular subject, seeing we're such a close relative to primates. It's lovely to have some humour back on the blog again - for those of you confused by my labelling, this series gives a nod to a series of the same name in Private Eye , where they deliberately label the items featured the wrong way round. I see they've now renamed the series Lookalikes, which you can see here .

We're back from a tour of the middle Rhine area, having travelled there by train and then making a base for ourselves at Boppard, just south of Koblenz. We had a lovely time exploring the beauty of the area, thanks to the local tourist tax of 1.50 Euros per night giving us the freedom of local buses and trains, plus free entry to the informative local museum. On our final day we headed upstream to the small town of Bacharach, a former capital of the region and full of old timber framed houses like those you can see in the above photo. It was also festival time, with the streets bedecked with colourful flags and other decorations, the central one giving a clue to us being in the heart of the wine making area, with vineyards stretching impossibly steeply up the valleys either side of the river. No wonder wine production continues to be mainly by hand in this area. We could see the first hints of autumn* along the river valley, though daytime temperatures and sunlight were distinctly ...

Here I am with my friend and fellow garden writer Sue on Chelsea Press Day, our fab photo kindly taken by another friend and photographer Ian Thwaites, who's given his permission for me to use it in this post. Thanks Ian!* 'Oi, stand aside,' I hear you say... 'we want to see the garden you've been telling us about for months!' Well, here it is... ...almost exactly the same view, but without us!  I'm also rather fond of this photo looking the other way, despite it being shot into the light. I think it gives it a slightly mystical feeling, especially as I mentally called the tree on the left 'the whomping willow' whenever I saw it. Weren't we lucky with the weather! The reaction to The Flood Resilient Garden on the day, on the Chelsea TV coverage, and in the press was immense. Naomi and her co-designer Ed certainly caught the zeitgeist after our miserable rainy winter and spring. Joanna Lumley said she adored it. Here are a few more scenes from the...

I spent an amazing couple of days at RHS Chelsea helping Naomi with the planting tasks for her Flood Resilient garden . This is what I learned along the way... Have hi viz, will travel! Luckily I didn't need to borrow NAH's heavy duty railworking hi viz jacket and trousers (on standby in case it really poured with rain), nor did I need a hard hat as I was working after the main construction phase. I had to take an online site safety course and test before being allowed on site It's good to travel comfortably and wait until the last moment to don your heavy steel capped boots. Even better when you find a bench at Chelsea Barracks to do so whilst admiring their fab Chihuly glass installation at their Spring Festival Have a spare pair of steel capped boots available when the rubber tread on your day one boots drops off on the way home. Luckily I was by the Barracks when this happened and could swiftly change into my trainers. Even luckier is my shoe size is almost the same as ...

We're just back from a fabulous time in France and Italy in celebration of significant birthdays and anniversaries. We particularly loved the higgledy hillside clinging buildings we discovered in Genoa and its surrounding coastal villages of Camogli, Portofino , Nervi and the Cinque Terre . I've chosen a photo I took in Camogli to illustrate the perfect combination of bright ice cream coloured buildings, bobbing boats and Mediterranean vegetation we found in many of the villages. Look closer and you'll see many of the buildings have designs painted on them in a technique called sgraffito - one layer of paint or plaster scratched through to reveal a second colour below. Talking of ice cream, the rich dark chocolate fondant flavour was declared our holiday winner. You're probably familiar with pesto and focaccia already - some of the typical regional (Ligurian) cuisine we sampled along the way. Homemade and freshly made that day took them to another level. It's be...

One of the highlights of the recent Garden Press Event was the Guernsey Clematis stand where they showcased their two clematis due for launch* at this year's Chelsea Flower Show. If you're unfamiliar with the company name, then I'm sure you know of the lovely Raymond Evison , who is the breeder behind these two new plants. * = if they're launching them at Chelsea, then it looks like I've let the cat out of the bag 😉 On the left of the photo we have 'Lindsay' with 'Guernsey Flute' on the right. Both have been selected for their plentiful blooms across the entire length of their stems, flowering from May through July with a second flush in September. They grow to around 6 feet in height (90-120cm in metric) and are good candidates for a large pot as well as the more usual site in the garden. 'Lindsay' is the one for sunshine and 'Guernsey Flute' for the shadier side of things - as is the case with most white clematis. Unlike its forebe...

As you can see, Chippenham's Knatty Knitters have once again cheered up the town with their postbox toppers. This one greeted me outside our main sorting office when I went to post our Christmas cards and there are more to be found elsewhere; some familiar from previous years, others are new like this one. We're in the process of changing our Christmas plans as my BIL and wife have tested positive for Covid, thankfully with just mild symptoms but we thought it best for them to concentrate on getting back to full health for now. We plan to meet up in New Year for jolly times, so we'll have a quiet Christmas here instead. Thank goodness we'd already bought our own turkey! Have a healthy, peaceful, and wonderful Christmas and New Year wherever you may be.

  Part of Tom Massey's Resilient Garden at RHS Hampton Court I've been pondering VP Gardens a lot lately. Last year's drought conditions set me off initially, then our harsher than usual winter combined with this summer's flip and flop weather means the thinking continues. It's a huge topic which I freely admit I'm struggling to get my head around. Tom Massey's Resilient Garden  at Hampton Court recently  tackled this topic brilliantly and was a timely interlude which gave me much food for thought. There he encapsulated the detailed research he'd found which informed both his show garden and book of the same name. I think it's one of the most important show gardens I've ever seen. It's clear the way I garden needs to change so that I have my own resilient garden. I haven't worked out the exact details yet, but Tom's book plus a couple of others (see below), alongside the rainwater management handout from the show garden's  sponso...

  Rubber ducks lined up outside my local Lidl*, why? I don't mind because they gave me a giggle on the way home from the physiotherapist the other day. My guess is they're something to do with the virtual duck race Springboard School are running, but I could be wrong. There's news on our local Facebook group this morning that chocolate's appeared on the same route home and also in John Coles Park . Perhaps someone's on a mission to cheer up Chippenham? The mystery continues... * = NAH and I call it our corner shop seeing it's such a short walk away 😂

It's Bank Holiday time for us to celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee and amongst the usual Union Jacks and bunting, Chippenham has put its own special touches to the celebrations. Like many communities we have some special postbox toppers and I found the one above earlier this week gracing one in Monkton Park. I know our Knatty Knitters have other plans afoot, so I'm off to explore the centre of town later today. The Museum has had a couple of Jubilee projects I've been involved with. The Young Photographers group worked hard on their '70 Years, 70 Faces' and found at least one face per year of the Queen's reign. NAH and I went along to see ours at the Yelde Hall and add a new meaning to 'we were beside ourselves'! You may recognise a couple of the faces as Mark Allum (below me) and Lisa Lloyd (top right) from Antiques Roadshow live in Chippenham. I think NAH has fared particularly well in the photos, but then I'm biased! I - along with my WI...

  It's been a while* since we visited the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail and we had a marvellous afternoon there last weekend following the waymarked trail and finding out which ones** from last year's temporary exhibition are still there. The trail's website says these will be absorbed into the main trail, which brings the sculpture total up to 20. It was great to find Michelle Cain 's Animal Shelter is one of them and it's inspired me to return to one of my favourite regular blog features, Friday Bench . Previously seen on Sign of the Times , I've decided to retire that blog because I think Instagram is the appropriate platform for most of that content nowadays***. Friday Bench is the exception, so please welcome my seated discoveries to their new home 😊 * = um, decades ** = we found four out of the eight *** = which has more of a VP out and about style about it

From my door to your home, I hope this time is as merry and bright as it can be under the current circumstances. This year's wreath is foraged greenery on a straw base with ornaments saved from previous ones. It's bearing up remarkably well after nearly 3 weeks despite no moss or oasis base to keep the foliage moist. New-to-me greenery used in this way are the Clematis 'Winter Beauty' I pulled from the pergola, plus lots of fragrant rosemary from a friend's garden. I spent a lovely morning at my neighbours recently where we all managed to create something beautiful for our front doors in aid of Dorothy House , a cause dear to her heart as they looked after her late husband so well. Enjoy the turning of the year towards the lighter days again and I'll see you in 2022!