Veg Plotting

Fun times with friends (thanks for the photo, Clare) and a festive Slovenia made for a very special time when we visited recently. As you can see Bled was both festive and green, and being a garden blogger it's natural that I should celebrate both with this post about my travels there. Let's see what I found... We loved the Christmas lights in Ljubljana, with each street having its own theme. One had musical notes to accompany the classical music being played there; another had planets, comets and galaxies which made the crowd go 'Oooh!' when they were switched on in the early evening. The pictured street was more intriguing, with it's double DNA helix, a sperm, a nucleus, and a female egg. Too bad we found out just a few hours before we were to leave that there's a guided walk around the lights , which reveals the artist Zmago Modic's intentions. I'm speculating that as a Catholic country, this represents the immaculate conception. There ...

Travelling across Europe by train from the UK often means a change of stations in Paris. On the way to Switzerland our walk from the Gare du Nord to Gare de l'Est was uneventful. The return walk was different: it held a surprise. There's a choice of routes available: turn right out of the station and an elegant staircase and a five minute walk is one option. Turn left and and the sign says it's a ten minute walk. In view of our suitcases, we chose to turn left. I'm glad we did because otherwise I would have missed Patric Blanc 's green wall on the Rue d'Alsace. It's turned a dreary alley way into something spectacular. At the time of installation (2008), it was the largest he'd designed, with a surface area of 1,500 square metres. In his book, The Vertical Garden , Patric Blanc says: "When Fanny Giraud and Michel Piloquet invited me to visit the project site, I thought I was dreaming: an endless dark alley linking the Gare de l'E...

You may have guessed already that I loved our holiday in Switzerland. I adored the mountains and their views; the clean air; and the beauties of nature ready for us to drink in and admire. My garden blogger antennae were also finely tuned to pick up anything of a garden nature and I was surprised to find a distinct style throughout every village, which in turn formed its own backdrop to our visit. It was a complete contrast to the more eclectic and individual style I see from the train in the UK. The first feature I noticed were the window boxes on every chalet crammed with cheerful pelargoniums. Most of these were red, as if there was an unspoken rule on what a windowbox should contain. It was good to see there were others willing to flout this 'rule'. I'd say pink was the next choice, followed by white. It was clear the Swiss love to have plenty of colour in their gardens. An antidote to the white of winter perhaps? I was also pleased to see lots of apple...

I'm delighted to be featured on the back page of Garden News this week, where I talk about the delights of The Gower Peninsula . Unfortunately I have the byline instead of Naomi Slade who wrote the article, not me. I merely enthused down the phone at her and she's accurately captured what I said. I'm now desperate to go there again. Where's your favourite place?

It's nine years since our last visit to Liverpool and my postcard , and the building work along the waterfront which was much in evidence at that time is now complete. Those familiar with previous times may mourn the loss of the old character of this part of the city, but for this visitor it made for a magical Sunday morning stroll. We were staying in the city centre, so it's just a 5 minute walk to reach the start of our weekend wander at Albert Dock . I love strong shapes and combined with their reflections, I spent a while trying to do these justice with my camera. 'Laurel and Hardy' were being briefed outside the Merseyside Maritime Museum . Their day had just started when I strolled by. Sadly I didn't have time to go into Tate Liverpool , but that didn't matter as there is plenty of public art on view outside. This is the Tate's latest by Ugo Rondinone. Like The Guardian , I'm not so sure about this one, but that's one of the stre...

We've been in Lancashire for a few days where I had the opportunity to discover some apple varieties which suit more northern climes. I'm delighted I wasn't that familiar with most of these and there's just enough time left to write this post for today's Apple Day  celebrations. The larger picture shows ' Lemon Pippin ' with its unusual yet giveaway shape. Its site description says (which differs in some details with the one given in the link): An old apple of the 18th or 19th Century, origin either Norman or English. A dessert/cooker with a crisp flesh and slightly tangy in taste. Pick October to December. The other unnamed apples shown are ' Duke of Devonshire ' which resided in the basket of one of the scarecrow trail's figures. Judging by the crop in the orchard and on sale in the courtyard, this looks to be a prolific russet variety. Here are the links to descriptions of the named varieties in the photographs: ' Pott's Se...

One of my favourite sights on Jersey were these vegetable stalls at the side of the road. We found four of them, and this one was the first we discovered (at L'Etacq at dusk) and is also my favourite. It's the only one perched atop a wall (the rest relied solely on pallets) and I love how you can see the fields behind where the produce is grown, plus the clear light and the thin blue line which shows how close we are to the sea. Now you can see how the system works. The produce is refreshed at least once a day and relies on an honesty box for payment. The island is famed for its potatoes and the Jersey Royal now has Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status, which means only potatoes grown and harvested on the island can be named as such*. There were a few bags of them for sale, alongside cabbage, kale, spinach, sweetcorn, courgettes, green beans and tomatoes. All are grown organically. The stalls belong to Le Feuvre Farms , a family concern that's been fa...

I've explored the cheaper options for getting to London lately as I've been tempted up there quite a lot in March. As a result, I've enjoyed a different view of our capital from the bus compared to my usual train journey. Highlights are a quick glimpse of Chiswick House , plus the trip along the Thames Embankment  and a view of the boat houses moored on the river, even a Thames barge last week. Then we go past Chelsea Physic Garden and the Royal Hospital grounds with the latter looking quite calm compared to RHS showtime. It's a surprise to see the Chelsea pensioners in the local Tesco Express dressed in their workaday blue uniform instead of the red finery we're used to. Spotting the Thames boat houses made me itch to capture their varied gardens for my Unusual Front Gardens series, as does the green wall I spotted on the side of the Porsche showroom as we whisked through Chiswick. I've yet to find the best opportunity to photograph these as I've...

For once we managed to get abroad for our main holiday this year, by taking a cottage for 2 weeks in Ireland - in County Wicklow (just 30 miles or so south of Dublin) to be precise. It's always interesting to visit a country with a shared heritage to your own, to gain a different perspective on common history and to experience subtle differences in a familiar way of life. Our last minute destination was akin to choosing somewhere with a hatpin - what was available in early September which looked interesting. I did no research whatsoever (unusual!) and I had no idea until we arrived that Wicklow calls itself the ' Garden of Ireland '. We could have visited a different garden every day and still have enough left over to fill 2 weeks more - and then some. I had to ration myself to just a few as it was NAH's holiday too. We were lucky with the weather, which is just as well as County Wicklow is very much an outdoors kind of place. We were just a couple of miles away...

NAH and I have just returned from an invigorating week in the Yorkshire Dales . We stayed in a cosy "two up, two down" cottage in Embsay , a small village just outside the thriving market town of Skipton . Last Monday we ventured high into the Dales to the village of Hawes where we stuffed ourselves with deliciously authentic Wensleydale cheese from the local creamery . The pictured scene is one we encountered about half way between Hawes and Kettlewell and is the kind of picture I've always wanted to capture of the Dales. We were only about an hour from the bustle of Leeds and Bradford, but this scene is from a completely different world: a place of sky, rock, hills and water. I love the distinctive shape and stone of the lone barn dwarfed by the hillside rising above it and the tiny cotton-wool like blobs of the grazing sheep. What this picture doesn't show you are the sounds I was hearing whilst taking it. There was the bubbling cry of a curlew and the twitterin...

If the above video isn't working, then try this link instead. Instead of the usual Sunday Supplement , I thought I'd put together a few things today as a rather nice miscellany for Christmas. First up is the above video which is my favourite Christmas carol ever, Three Kings from Persian Lands Afar . In fact this was the favourite of everyone at school, which is where I first learnt it. We all sang the soloist's part and the school orchestra would play the rest at our carol concert. We also had something called Friday Songs , where each form would take it in turns to choose 3 songs for the entire school to sing. The last Friday of the Christmas term was always reserved for the Upper Sixth to choose 6 carols. Time constraints meant we rarely got to sing all the choices, but Three Kings was never dropped. Art lovers may like to have a look at a selection of entries for this year's Turnip Prize , a Somerset pub's antidote to the Turner Prize where the award is f...

I think the biggest proportion of all the time I've 'wasted' in my life so far is that spent watching clouds . I find them fascinating because they're ever changing - unless it's an unusually cloudless day of course. From the wispiest of clouds like the pictured cirrus , through to the threatening anvil shaped cumulonimbus of an approaching storm, they also form a rough guide to the weather we can expect over the next few hours. On the project I'm involved in Mallorca, I've been given the nickname 'weather woman' because I've managed to quickly absorb (without realising it) how the subtle changes in the haziness of the nearby mountains and any cloud cover they have affects the weather later on that day. It's proved useful on many occasions when arranging our fieldwork for the day. The work's outdoors in a reed bed and the last thing you want to be is the tallest thing around when a violent Mediterranean storm suddenly blows up! Clouds a...

Almost completely at random (i.e. find a cottage in North Norfolk that's centrally located, reasonably priced and for 4 or more people - we always like things to be a bit more roomy on holiday) we found ourselves based in Great Massingham - all the villages in North Norfolk have cheerful signs like the one pictured. It's just how an English village should be, with an extensive village green and with not one, but four massive ponds. These came complete with bulrushes, yellow flag irises and a multitude of quacking ducks, some of whom were found outside our door every morning in spite of Squid, the cottage owners' cat. A place with a traditional church, sadly not one of the intriguing fortress style churches found elsewhere in the area, but built from the same materials. A thriving village shop plus a pub rescued from the ashes of the deceased Rose and Crown and resurrected as The Dabbling Duck . An object lesson in how a community/council partnership can restore the beati...

Hello, hello, good to be back ... A change of scenery and two weeks without a computer - absolute bliss. Of course it means I've got loads to tell you - gardens, bookshops, places, wildlife, public planting and an Art Deco marvel just to whet your appetite. However, I also have hundreds of photos to sort, a massive sack of post and e-mails to sift through, probably loads of weeds up at the allotment as we've had 30+ mm of rain whilst I was away and a photography competition deadline on Wednesday. Oh, and there's a little matter of cramming 5 weeks worth of song learning and rehearsals - including knowing all the words in several languages - into two weeks ready for Sing for Water on June 26th. Gulp. Then back in the world of blogging there's Blooms Day tomorrow, all your comments here - many thanks for them, you've been as delightfully thoughtful and thought provoking as ever - and I need to catch up with everything you've been up to as well. So forgive this l...

...Austin The sight of this fairground ride really made me smile on Sunday. The attention to detail is fantastic: the little cars, the petrol pumps, the cashiers area - it all just looks totally right. It also took me right back to my childhood as living in Northfield (if you click on the link, there's a couple of photos of the church where NAH I got married), we were in earshot of 'The Austin' factory in Longbridge. I always knew when it was five o'clock as we would hear the horn sounding the end of the afternoon shift. Whilst I believe this make of car was never made, it reminds me of the A40 - my next door neighbour had one and her black model is one of my earliest memories of cars. My family has quite a few associations with 'The Austin' too - one of my uncles was an electrician at the factory and my dad worked at Triplex, the company supplying car windscreens. When I was little, my gran (mum's mum) lived in the Austin Village at Turves Green in one...

...Welsh Ever since joining ABC Wednesday I'd always planned W to be something to do with Wiltshire as it's where I live. However, last week's last minute holiday to an even bigger W, put paid to all of that. We may have only travelled a couple of hundred miles, but Wales certainly feels like being in a different country. The fact that around 40% of the population are native Welsh speakers plays a major part and we were staying and travelling around stronghold Welsh speaking communities in North Wales so got to hear it most of the time. The radios playing in shops are tuned to Welsh speaking stations, TV's Channel 4 shows the Welsh version and the word on the street is in it. In fact I was so entranced by the sound I even followed (surreptitiously I hasten to add) a young father and his toddler girl around Woolworths in Porthmadog just to hear them, in spite of having absolutely no idea of what they were actually talking about - probably something along the lines of ...

No, I haven't got the date wrong - it is indeed St Patrick 's Day today. At least according to the Catholic Church it is. They've moved St Patrick's Day as it's regular slot on Monday is in Holy Week - so secular feasts need to give way to the big one. I'm sure this won't faze my ex-Irish colleagues at all - it'll be an excuse for 2 enormous parties (or even a continuous one) instead. It's all because Easter's so early this year (the earliest since 1913 to be precise), thus proving as far as national saints go, there is such a thing as a moveable feast. The last time it happened was in 1940, when the day also coincided with Palm Sunday. The next time will be 2160, so enjoy the Craic whilst you can!

Whenever we visit my Brother-in-law, we enter a part of Britain mysteriously known as The Rhubarb Triangle. Luckily, this area of Yorkshire doesn't have the same characteristics as the Bermuda variety, so we usually emerge relatively unscathed at the end of our visits to wend our way back to Wiltshire again. The Rhubarb Triangle is an area bounded by Leeds, Wakefield and Bradford. It's the ideal area for rhubarb growing as it lies in a frost pocket east of the Pennines. This ensures plenty of frosty nights to break the rhubarb's dormancy in time for digging the crowns up and placing them in large forcing sheds in November/December. In complete darkness, the plant produces lashings of tender pink sticks ready for eating from January through to March. Radio 4's The Food Programme did a piece on this a few years ago and I was surprised by the frequent popping noises when the presenter entered the forcing shed - you can hear the rhubarb growing! Many generations of pro...