Autumn Cottage Diarist

Three Beautiful Boys in the Snow

Three cock pheasants come to lunch

They were there when I got up at 7.30...popped in on several occasions during the morning, and have now just left for the cover of the bushes when they spotted me with my camera. Not a competition winning shot...but evidence that these often stroppy males can get along together when food is in short supply. The story will be different after Christmas, when they seek to impress their wives!

Two other regular visitors to the feeder each morning...the ever present little Blue-tits, and a solitary Pied Wagtail, which pops down and immediately takes its fodder up onto the conservatory roof. Entertainment of the highest pleasure, all while I enjoy a cuppa. Lucky me!

  Blue-tit

Pied Wagtail

Mother Nature's Rhinestones

  Rose hips

No sunshine today...bitterly cold, overcast, miserable. But still...frostings and crustings of ice crystals everywhere in the garden...lovely.

Hellebore and cotoneaster

Alchemilla

Holly

Thistle, oak and beech

 

Birds Queue Up as the Thermometer Goes Down

Several days into unusually early plummeting temeratures here, and though, thankfully, we have been spared snow in North Hampshire - for now - it is freezing on all other counts. - 4C here last night - positively warm in comparison to the temperatures recorded in Wales.

The beautiful cock pheasant above is taken just outside the conservatory window, where he does a sterling job at pecking up much that falls from the feeder tray above (along with his own portion of scattered grain which I put down for him). Those golden feathers, glinting in the sun, are really something to await and enjoy each day.

Pip, on the other hand, is much more at home on the *inside* of the conservatory - here he is contemplating whether or not to venture out to 'hunt' Mr. Pheasant. Contemplation lasted thirty seconds - then he came up into the office  - to go to bed :-)

Only November and already hard winter has started to bite. The birds will stay fed and I will try to keep warm, but throughout the coming winter, from both inside and outside Autumn Cottage, I will also appreciate - and continue to share with you -  the beauty that even these hard temperatures and short days bring.

Today - even in the cold and dark, I am thankful for each season and its gifts.

The sun already well on its way to setting through a filigree of trees at the bottom of the garden - 2.24 pm, last Wednesday.

There's a Hole in my Bucket...

The old Privy

Four, actually. Prompted by the imminent arrival of the septic tank emptier on his annual visit, I thought you may be interested to see how the process was 'handled' in the not-that distant past here at Autumn Cottage.The previous owner of the cottage was, back in the 1950's, the  Head Mistress of one of the local village schools - very much a contemporary of 'Miss Read' - who also lived not far away. She told me the story of how she had come to the village from the city, and was one day regaled by the chortles of the schoolchildren, who announced that the Lavender Cart had overturned in the village. Bewildered, she had to enquire what such a cart may be? and was patiently enlightened by a seven year old that said cart was actually that used to remove excess night soil from the houses around about - given the name of 'Lavender Cart' in allusion to its pervasive perfume!

I wonder if a similar cart visited Autumn Cottage? - maybe to take away excess 'fertiliser'... if so, here is an example of what would have been emptied onto it, which has been stored away amongst other garden paraphernalia here for a long time. It is what I have only recently realised is probably the original soil bucket which would have been placed beneath a wooden seat in the  brick privy, which still stands here in the garden.

Methinks, though, that scattered cottages like this were more likely to retain much of this product - perhaps tipping it into a soil pit to rot down and add to the other forms of compost that would have then been returned to the earth to maintain the high fertility responsible for the abundance of vegetables, fruit and flowers seen in so many images of the Victorian cottage garden. It is said that in many old habitations in country and town, that the most wonderful tomatoes were those grown behind 'the little garden house'!

I'm ashamed to say that I pierced four holes in the bucket and used it as a planter when I first discovered it, thinking it just a common old bucket, discarded under a tree when we acquired 'the house next door' fifteen years ago. But since rediscovering it and noticing it's unusual shape, wide-topped and with two side-handles for greater ease of emptying, I am sure that it is more unusual - almost certainly the bucket that belongs to the privy, and definitely to be treated with more respect than I have done up to now.

Mea culpa - time to make amends and take greater care of a little bit of history. The old privy is now used here to store day-to-day garden hand tools - though my neighbour has restored hers to its original state. Along with the house, the privy is a Listed Building, and in the major clear-up and re-assessment which is going on here at the cottage at present, I'm minded to think that further restoration of our own 'Lavender Bower' may not be in order as well? It is just a precious a piece of history as the grand houses round about, and indeed more at risk of disappearing for good if it is not valued by ourselves. Watch this Space for developments in  Lavender land!

On a sweeter note, below are two visitors to the garden this morning purely for your pleasure...a Great Tit gobbling peanuts from the new feeding station,

and the elegant but aggressive Nuthatch which sees off any other visitors to the food. Never mind....there's enough for all - unless the squirrel decides to visit...but that is another story for another day.

Happy Monday, everyone - may you walk in beauty - even though you may be surrounded by Lavender !

What do your Present Cushions Look Like?

Tapestry covers taken from medieval wall hangings.

One of this blog's readers - Brigitte - asked me this a few days ago. No plumping or poshifying - here is a quick ramble through my big sitting room with my camera to show what cushions (pillows) I have there right now. Nothing very special - just indulgence of my love of textiles. Enjoy!

Blue and white cotton panel, taken from an oriental B&W plate, & a Bargello needlepoint cushion.

Fanciful gentlemen...

... and ladies a-playin' of the croquet - more tapestry panels (purchased at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire).

Two woven panels on a papier mache chair (yes - they ARE both upside-down - just noticed!!) - the chair rescued from a skip a few years ago :-)

Antique embroidered and beaded cushions & a devore panel from Venice over the back of the sofa

My favourite latest acquisition - especially awaiting my writing workshop attendees.

My Long Ago Happy Land

Working today on one of the personal memoir writing workshops I am offering in 2011, I was taken aback by discovering this photograph of the interior of my first apartment fourteen floors up in a tower block in South Wales - my first venture into independent living, back in 1974. How much a photograph can hold - so many of those items carry their own story.

There is the white 'swivel chair' that I saved up for over many, many months, convinced that was essential to give my apartment  an air of of elegance and sophistication :-).  There's the little TV - only black and white pictures, but oh, how much of a companion it was in the first weeks there, when I wondered if I had not also launched myself into eternal loneliness alongside liberating independence!

There are the cushions (pillows), that I patchworked, crocheted and Bargello embroidered with my early passion for textiles which still abides. There's my record player, with all my collection of (vinyl) discs stacked beside it....The Eagles, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel  (sigh) - and there is my great grandmother's oil lamp, temporarily converted then for electricity, but still with me today with its glass shade and put to use when we have a power cut.

There's the desk at which I sat to study for a zoology exam, and always, the books, the stacks and piles of books. There, on the walls, a Japanese woodcut, given to me by my boyfriend at the time. And there, in front of my trendy chair, the little occasional table which my Mother proudly bought for her own mother with her first week's wages as a 'clippie' bus conductress during WW2.

Such ordinary artefacts - such particular histories. Have you got any reminders like this of your own special "stuff" and the stories that the items carry? If you have, why not get them out soon and write down the stories  of the things that have made us who we are - you may be amazed at what you remember - and what other memories that story-telling evokes.

Beech, Birch, Elder, Maple...apple, whitebeam, sycamore, oak

A once-upon-a-time-hedge...Field maples at the bottom of the garden

It has been a day for gathering up the leaves at Autumn Cottage - another free harvest from Mother Nature if we care to collect. I have been 'bagging up' leaves for a few years now - piling them into black refuse bags with a few holes at the bottom and stacking them behind the sheds and fences, hidden away to break down into brown gold - leafmould, which acts as a wonderful soil conditioner and fertiliser. But there is such an abundance of leaves here each year that I rapidly run out of bags and places to hide them.

Two old fire-guards = 1 excellent new leaf cage!

This year I have had a brainwave and utilised two old safety fire guards that have been knocking around the garden for a long time. (I can't remember how I acquired them - but do remember thinking that they would come in handy for something one day). I dragged one from the bottom of the garden to join the other one that has been languishing behind the greenhouse - upended them and lashed them together very simply with some gardening wire, and lo - a large open mesh leaf-bin, some 48 inches (1.2 metres) square, into which I have been able to pile springy-sack after springy sack (collapsible garden refuse bins stiffened with a spring coil to keep them open) - 21 loads in all so far. Nearly ALL the garden leaves for this year are now piled up in there, and still there is room to spare.

A carpet of delicate maple leaves ready to be gathered into the springy-sack

There were two main carpets of leaves in the garden - those - light and delicate - at the bottom of the garden, from the field maple, and a carpet of much tougher, ligneous leaves under the apple tree. I alternated loads from each, as they all break down better if they are mixed - now all I have to do is leave them (leave them - get it? :-)) - For a year, and then add to the veg and flower beds as yet another way of returning nutrients and texturisers instead of piling them on a heap and setting fire to them. What a waste - and I do love free stuff in the garden!

I've had plenty of company as well - as the days grow much shorter, Lissie stays closer to the cottage (she apparently spends longer days with my neighbours across the road). This is why Pip appears so much more often here than Liss - but just for the record, here they are together, valiantly holding down the scraps of old carpet that are suppressing weeds prior to me digging over the beds. (Not beautiful, but very, very effective).

'Am I Not Beautiful?'

Pip then put in a solo appearance high up in the Acer branches, just to let me know that pussycats can do such things as run vertically up a tree, while Humans really can't. He enjoys looking down on me...(though there was a blue-tit flitting around some much higher branches, demonstrating to Pip that dicky birds can fly - whilst cats - er - very much can't. Oh, the humiliation!

A blue-tit enjoying the last apples, left on the tree precisely for that purpose

A (rather tatty) Red Admiral, soaking up the last rays of the sun on a blackcurrant leaf in the veg garden

Looking closely in Autumn Cottage garden reveals that Nature only *seems* to  close down for the winter. Though the leaves of the Cotinus, about to fall, are truly going out in a blaze of glory, the jasmine (along with the hellebores) is bursting into full flower now, demonstrating that there is actually always something interesting and full of vitality going on in the garden - if only we open our eyes to see and appreciate it.

Purple Cotinus leaves, decaying in a dramatically decorative manner

Winter Jasmine bursting forth - always something beautiful to enjoy

Dig Winter Veg for Victory!

From the days before TV programmes or websites...here's a little gardening help leaflet issued in WW2, which I have not seen before,  found just this morning amongst my father's papers while I do some family history filing as part of my office clear-up.

I have been thinking just this week of which seeds I need to sow in order that I will have a supply of veggies in the garden through next winter (I've been poorly organised in this regard up until now)...and lo - into my hand falls this leaflet as if in answer to that musing - Thanks, Dad!

I will, of course, follow up the suggested plan with a bit of research into best varieties etc - but it's a jolly good motivating start, isn't it? Feel free to copy for your own use...as always, right click to download. I can send a .pdf if you prefer that - just ask.

For the Beauty of the Earth...and the Sustenance of the Spirit

Once again I invite you to stroll with me along the woodland road and into the woods near here on the walk I took two days ago into Great Pen Wood. I am so grateful to have easy access to such beauty - everyone should be able to touch and be touched by it - so you can imagine why I am especially horrified at this latest threat to some of the woodlands of the UK.

The possibility of the sale of Forestry Commission land into private hands probably heralds the possible loss of public access to much of it, with consequential deprivation of contact with nature which I believe we all need for the nourishment of the Spirit. Humans indeed cannot live by bread alone. In these economically difficult and stressful times, it seems that there is a death-wish intention by some political bodies to remove access to stress reduction and healing through this free source of immersion in the natural world, rather than increase it. One more short and narrow sighted political move with grasping financial considerations the only ones in sight. Then, as stress increases, the overburdened NHS will be called upon to hand out the antidepressants - I would prescribe a walk in the woods! I am angry and protest vehemently at this short sightedness.

But for now, I immerse myself again in nature through these images and once again find peace, as I hope you are also able to do.

 

Beauty in pots at the Penwood Nursery - I'll have the red one!

Down into the woods...

  Abundant fungi of all descriptions

  Crunching through a carpet of beech leaves

Bark stripped by badgers on the hunt for insects

Bracket fungi

Home again to the Burning Bush!