One year on!

Well, it's now one year since we moved over here. I still have no regrets, although every now and then I find I'm missing something - like a good Turkish restaurant, NPR, the book club, the dinner club, the polymer clay guild and all our other good friends.

However, we do have lots of good friends over here, and one of them visited us this week. This is Dolly with her cat Frankie. Dolly and I are exactly the same age (born on the same day, in fact) and we were flat mates in Hamilton when we did our Master's degrees at McMaster. She worked in Canada for a while and then came home to the UK. We went to the US, but we've stayed in touch ever since (it's nearly 40 years since we met!).

Dolly is a brilliant artist and is also keen on natural history in all its forms, so we have a lot in common. We talked almost non-stop for two days! This was helped on Wednesday by rainy weather, so we stayed in a lot of the day

On Thursday the weather was lovely and we had a day out. We started off by driving up the Burway, parking at the top and having a bit of a walk on the Mynd. In the picture below we're looking eastwards across the Stretton Valley to Caer Caradoc. The colours up in the hills are lovely right now. The whinberry bushes are turning reddish brown, the bracken is bright green and the heather is purple as it comes into full bloom.

We didn't have much of a whinberry crop this year. Whinberries are the local, wild, blueberries. They are very small, but quite delicious. Unfortunately, the drought came at the wrong time for them and there are very few fruit.

Many of the wild blackberries are looking dry and hard, too. In some places there are tons of them and in others there's nothing. It all depends on just how much water there was in that area. However, we've promised ourselves that we'll take a plastic container with us wherever we go so we can harvest berries when we find them. There are lots of cobnuts (hazelnuts) about too and I'd like to get a few of them before the squirrels have them all!

After a smashing lunch in a pub in Wentnor, we carried on into Wales to Rhyadr. This was to visit the Red Kite feeding station at Gigrin Farm. It was definitely the highlight of the day, with a spectacular show of these lovely birds. The photo to the left shows John and Dolly at the farm and all the birds you can see in the sky are Red Kites. I took lots of pictures, but none of them are very good, so I think you'll get a better sense of what happens here if you visit their web site.

Yesterday was REPATRIATION DAY!!!! The first anniversary of our arrival in the UK. Next week will be the anniversary of moving into Peel Wyke. We celebrated by having dinner at a Thai restaurant in Shrewsbury after we'd worked in the museum for a few hours.

Yesterday was also the day I started on some new drugs to cancel out the side effects of the Arimidex. This is something I hoped I'd never have to do, but they got bad enough that I'm now on an anti-depressant and something for my digestive upsets. I really don't want to move away from the Arimidex although an alternative drug was suggested, so we're trying to cope with the side effects rather than risk a whole different set of them! Oh well ... only another 4 years to go! In the meantime, while I get used to these new drugs I'm wandering around like I was stoned for most of the morning! In fact, I think I've got the munchies - maybe I'll go get some lunch and have a nap!

Stay in touch, please!

Our on-again, off-again stream!

Hello everyone!

This is just a quick post to let you know that we've had a fair bit of rain over the last few days and the stream has come back temporarily a couple of times. Unfortunately, it has disappeared again now, but we continue to hope!

By sheer fluke we were actually looking at the stream bed when the water started to flow down it. It was lovely to be able to hear it burbling away again. I really miss it when it's dry.

Last weekend, Barry and Sheila visited us. We had a very nice day at Ludlow, visiting the market, lunching at the Unicorn and walking around the town and then in the evening they took us to the Studio for a wonderful dinner. On the way home we heard Irish music coming from the King's Head so we went in for a nightcap. What a smashing day!

On Sunday it rained a bit as we managed to get lost on the Mynd, but still had a good walk up Townbrook Hollow and back down Ashes Hollow for lunch at the Green Dragon in Little Stretton. We all had faggots! As usual, they were delicious. For those of you who don't know what they are, they are a VERY LARGE meatball made of liver, onions and other stuff. They were served with lovely brown gravy, root mash (mashed potatoes, carrots and other root vegetables) and peas - YUMMY! The walk home from Little Stretton to Church Stretton was a bit fraught as we'd all managed to get stiff and sore from our walk, but we made it and spent the evening "vegging out" in front of the telly and watching the badgers.

On Monday, B & S left and we had major hedge work done along the stream bank. It looks a bit bare right now, but it'll soon grow and it's inspired me to do a bit of work outside. Margaret arrived the same evening for an overnight stay. We had a lovely visit, catching up on the news and doing a nice short walk on Tuesday morning. We took Margaret up to the Long Mynd Hotel where she and John and all the other first year geologists had their field trip back in the mid-60s. The place rings no bells with either of them. Either it has changed beyond recognition or they were having such a good time that they failed to notice any architectural details!

Wednesday Dave and Pam had us up to their house for dinner. It was steak and kidney pie and absolutely fabulous. Ella was very pleased to see us, offering up some of her favorite toys for inspection - yuck.

Thursday we had a real sustained rain for a while and it's brought us some much needed moisture. Hopefully some of the plants that were wilting will now perk up a bit. I spent the afternoon drawing the Blist's Hill waggons. I posted a photo of them earlier on. Here's a copy of my drawing:


On Friday John went off to the Bird Watching Fair at Rutland Water. I think he had a good time looking at all the displays, buying books and a birding vest and other goodies and attending lectures. He got back at about 1 am on Saturday morning. I'm glad I didn't go with him, I would have cramped his style! Instead, I had a neighbour lady over for what turned out to be a very boozy lunch. Really enjoyed it and the left-overs have been splendid all weekend, too!

Got out into the garden today and started some tidying and clean-up. John is beginning to look at books about ponds - I can't decide if a pond will make more or less work in the garden. I don't know if this will end up being a major engineering work or just a wildlife "puddle". Of course, we do have a great resource in Nick, our nephew, who now has his own landscaping business. We may well hire him to do all the work and help with some of the planning.

John has been working on our taxes this evening. He consulted with Sheila about it last weekend, but had pretty much worked it out for himself anyway. So far, he's pleased that the forms are very well set up and quite easy to follow and I think he's pretty well done with it for last tax year (2005-2006). We have now renounced our American resident status and will only have to file UK taxes next year, so there will be one more mixed filing and then it should all be a lot easier. We have to set up some sort of savings account so we can save our tax money as we transfer our income over from the States. Otherwise we'll be stuck with nothing to pay the bill with at the end of the year.

By the end of next week we'll have been living in the UK for a whole year! I think John is planning some sort of celebration. I'm planning to do a budget and expenses calculation and make sure we can still affort to continue in this life of luxury! I think we've been spending rather more than we expected to, but some expenses were due to moving and so I'm not quite sure how we're doing at this point. I'll feel a bit better once I've sorted it out and categorized it so we can see if we have to cut down on drinking or whether we can continue to live like profligates!

On the subject of greedy buggers, the badgers have continued their nightly visits, but have been coming earlier. They're also back digging in the lawn and tearing up my plants for bedding. GRRRRRRR!

We've got loads of baby birds about - especially large flocks of blue tits, chaffinches and green finches. There are at least 10 species that we know nested around here and have brought their babies to feed: blackbird, songthrush, robin, greenfinch, chaffinch, bullfinch, blue tit, great tit, coal tit, dunnock. Some of the youngsters looked very confused when it started to rain. If they were from a second brood, they wouldn't have seen any since they were born! In addition, there have been crows, magpies, house sparrows, wagtails and an immature female pheasant around. The local buzzards wheel about over head and scream a lot and we've heard tawny owls at night on several occasions.

Well, that's all for now. Take care of yourselves and please stay in touch!

Early August in my Mind and in the Garden

I was sad to see our Aussie visitors leave on August 1st. When we returned from Sweden and as we worked to get ready for our first set of visitors during June I found my depression had lifted and I was able to work and enjoy myself in a way that I hadn't done for months.

July was so busy I didn't have time to get worried or anxious or depressed, but the last week has been a different story and I found Winston Churchill's "Black Dog" descending on me again. It's not helped by worry over the war in the Middle East, but a lot of my anxiety is irrational and unnecessary. I know it, but I can't control it. And the drug I'm taking to keep the cancer at bay is making it worse. I had a meeting with my oncologist a couple of weeks ago and she suggested a change of drugs. I'm waiting for a couple of weeks so that her letter gets to my G.P. and then I'm going to go in and see if we can get this sorted out.

In the meantime I can get out into the garden or go to work at the museum and that helps me to control my black feelings.

Let me share some of my garden therapy! As you can see from this picture of one of our apple trees the fruit are ripening in spite of the drought! It's still very dry and warm here. In the past few weeks we've had a few showers with a quarter or an eigth of an inch each time, but it has barely wetted the soil, really. We're only watering things that are truly desperate or which have been recently seeded or transplanted and I've been surprised at how well most trees and shrubs are holding up.

This apple tree is the only one that has any fruit on it. The others had very little blossom and even fewer apples. I'm not sure why. I'll have to watch the buds more carefully next year. We DO have at least one pair of bullfinches and they love to eat apple buds so that may be the problem.

We've already had bumper crops of blackcurrents and gooseberries and today I picked a good handfull of loganberries (sort of thornless blackberries) which I plan to cook up with apples to make a crumble. I've frozen some of our rhubarb and blackcurrents so we'll be able to enjoy them later on in the year.

This picture is of the hydrangea under John's study window. It's quite small, but the color is lovely. We have two others, one a white climber and another which is a blue lacecap. Their leaves are browning off a bit, but otherwise they are hanging in there!

This little hydrangea has had another role for the past couple of months, being the soft landing place for several baby birds which flew into the window. None of them have been killed, and only a couple were dazed enough to hang around for very long. The window strikes have stopped now, so we think they were due to the inexperience of the youngsters! Fortunately they weren't very good flyers either and therefore didn't hit the window very hard!

Boy have we had youngsters! It seems to have been a very successful nesting year. Last week we had up to six immature blue tits on the fat feeder at the same time. The babies are flying around in mixed flocks now, so we get droves of young blue, coal and great tits attacking the fat, peanuts and sunflower seeds. And down below them are several young robins, dunnocks and chaffinches waiting for the droppings. If you add to that our 3 pheasants, a pair of crows, several pairs of wood pigeons, two pairs of greenfinches, at least one pair of bullfinches, and a couple of magpies you can see that our feeders and bird baths are very busy indeed.

We haven't seen any baby mammals, but we have a couple of bank voles, assorted mice, a few pesky squirrels and the badgers, so we're doing ok on those guys too!

We took advantage of the dry weather to get down in the streambed and tidy up. We've trimmed shrubs and trees that were overhanging, pulled up some weeds (can't pull up too many as we don't want to weaken the banks) and taken out a bit of trash. I got really stung by nettles, too! One lot swung round and swiped my face and scalp when I was pulling them up and another lot got me on the arms. It's given me a bit of lymphedema in my left arm, but I expect it to subside once my remaining lymph nodes pump the poison out of my arm!

But, of course it's the big drought resistant plants that are loving this hot and dry weather. Here's a picture of our Acanthus plants. They are tall, strong and vigorous and look absolutely wonderful. The bumble bees love them, climbing up into the flowers and getting completely lost in them.



This picture shows John's old cacti out having a summer holiday on our gravel "beach" in the back garden. These cacti are about 50 years old. John planted the seed when he was a little boy. His Dad looked after them while we were in North America until Joy took them over on his death. She was very pleased to pass them back to us when we came home to England for good!

To give you an idea of their size, the tall one at the back is about 18" tall.









My last picture is a more general view of that beach area. Click on it to get an enlarged view.

It's really a sunny little gravel patio. Behind the table and chairs you can see pink Phlox, orange Crocosmia and the tall umbels of hog weed. This latter has a smell that reminds me of an animal barn - I wonder if that's why they called it hog-weed?

But, take a look at the poor grass in the front of the picture. You can see that there are several very dry patches. Some parts of our lawns are now quite dead - especially where they were made up of moss or some weeds (oh- lawns are supposed to be made of grass, you say?). We're not too worried about it. I'm sure the grass will grow back as soon as we get some rain. It would be nice for that to happen soon, however.

Well, that's about all the news there is, for the moment.

Please stay in touch - e-mails from friends really brighten our days!

July Continued!

To continue with out trip to Welshpool with Chuck and Hazel. ..... We also visited Powys Castle. The view on the left is of the castle as it stands on a high south facing bank. The bank is landscaped in terraces which are loaded with wonderful flowers. On our long summer days these flowers get the full force of the sunshine from early in the morning till late in the evening and they really thrive.

If you click on the photo you can see more detail and you'll be able to see the buildings set into the terraces. One of these is an orangery where citrus fruits wintered over (they would spend the summer outside in pots. Above it is a cool brick lined fernery. We revisited this castle later in the month when Ric and Jan came to stay with us. John and I snoozed and sketched amongst the ferns while Ric and Jan explored the castle.

Inside the castle was renovated in Victorian and Edwardian times. It is quite "modern" with comfortable rooms and plenty of luxurious furnishings. I particularly liked the bathroom with a lovely soaking bath - something I could use right now after a day of gardening!

Another feature of Chuck and Hazel's visit was the food fayre and ale trail in Church Stretton. These took place over a weekend and included other non-food entertainments like Morris dancing in the market square and a dog agility demo. in Russell's Meadow.

In the photo to the left you can see some lady folk dancers who are being introduced by the Shrewsbury Town Crier. This man must be at least 7 feet tall and he's well built to boot! He has a voice to match, too! He came to open a market here a few months ago and I could hear him from our road almost a quarter of a mile away!


The ale trail was fun. There were 12 pubs around the Strettons and surrounding villages and you had to get your "Passport" stamped in each of them to get your certificate of participation and your specially decorated pint glass. Busses were laid on to take revellers from pub to pub so there was no danger from drunk driving. The event lasted for two days. Some chose to do it quicker, but we did 6 pubs each day and tried lots of different beers on the way round. Chuck made careful notes on all the beers he tried. We also found some we liked, but were even more interested in trying out the various pubs. We now have a few more that we can take visitors to when they come here! In fact, we did just that for Ric and Jan later in the month.

And here we are with Rick and Jan! I'm sorry that Ric's face is shaded, but it was a hot and sunny day so everyone except me was wearing a hat. I'm so glad to have hair these days that I don't usually bother, although I do wear sun-block.

We're standing at Pole Bank at the highest point on the Long Mynd. From there you can see a long, long way in every direction. Mid-Wales is behind us and to the south you can see all the way to the Malverns and the Brecon Beacons. To the north and east there are good views over the Severn Valley and you can usually pick out the steam rising from the cooling towers at Buildwas power station in the IronBridge Gorge.

We went to IronBridge with both sets of visitors last month. This photo is of some wagons in the Blists Hill Victorian Village. It's good to have the village and the museums there because the gorge is now a beautiful bucolic valley, with wooded trails and the clear rushing waters of the Severn River. It's hard to imagine that 200 years ago the place was a hellish inferno of iron smelters, clay and china works, mines, etc. Boats plied the river with loads of coal, limestone, tiles, crockery, etc. and the air was full of smoke and fumes. It was here in the mid-1700s that Abraham Darby discovered how to use coke to smelt iron and the Industrial Revolution was born. The symbol of it is the Iron Bridge itself. The first one ever built and a thing of great beauty. The area is now a World Heritage Site and home to several museums and places of interest.

We did quite a bit of walking with Jan and Ric. Apart from climbing to the top of the Mynd (and then returning via Sunday Lunch at the Green Dragon in Little Stretton), we also walked a small part (about 5 miles) of the Offa's Dyke path which runs along the English/Welsh border from Chepstow on the Bristol Channel to Prestatyn on the North Welsh coast, climbed Caer Caradoc on the east side of the Stretton Valley (about 5 or 6 miles) and did a walk in Snowdonia National Park.

While the Aussies were here it continued to be hot and dry. The lawns dried up and died in places, plants began to wilt and most of the flowers faded off. However the summer roses were beautiful and there look to be good crops of grain in the fields.

I guess that's all for July. I still have some early August garden pictures to show you all, so I'll continue with another posting tomorrow. Now it's time for bed so we can get an early start on Museum work tomorrow.

July Summary

Well, July is over and August is well on its way. I can't believe that we've been here for over 11 months already!

I've been a bit remiss with my postings in July as we had two sets of visitors with only 10 days in between to clean the house, catch up on work at the museum and work in the garden. In my last posting I gave you a brief summary of our visit from Chuck and Hazel. I promised to add more about their visit later and this is definitely later!

It turns out that I don't have many good photos from their visit. So I have shamelessly ripped off a couple from Chuck and Hazel's backup which they left with us! These are they:

These pictures were taken at Hay-On-Wye where we spent a happy day exploring the many second-hand bookshops. I think you can see larger versions of these pictures if you click on them.

One of the things we all enjoyed was our day in Welshpool. Down below are some pictures from that day. Riding the Llanfair Railway was a real treat, especially for the guys who love steam railways. I enjoyed the ride too, but am not quite so enamoured of getting bits of grit in your eyes and breathing sooty smoke all along the line! Still the scenery was lovely and the Bara Brith (a Welsh fruitloaf made with tea, spread with butter and eaten along with strong cups of tea) at Llanfair was to die for!







I wanted to load more pictures here, but it seems the blogger is getting cranky and won't allow me to do so. I'm going to stop for now and publish this and try to add more in the next posting which I will probably do later tonight!

Don't forget to keep those e-mails coming!

Our Stream Has Run Dry

8:15 pm and I'm sitting out in the garden. It's way too hot in my study for me to work up there. Thank goodness we bought this laptop and have a wireless network!

I have lots to write about, but only a limited amount of energy - so some of it will have to wait for another posting. Here's a summary of the news for the last month!

The warm spell we experienced in Sweden continued in England for a while. We were able to catch up on some gardening and get the house ready for our visitors - Chuck and Hazel from the U.S.

I also took my first horse-riding lesson. One of two booked as part of my 60th birthday present from John. I really loved it, as you can see in the photo, and I have now had my second lesson and have booked 4 more. I just wish I'd learned when I was a teenager.

We had a great time with Chuck and Hazel and did a lot of fun stuff. As soon as I stop sweating I'll do a special posting on that visit. The highlights included a July 4th trip to Hay-on-Wye, with an outdoor perfermance of MidSummer Night's Dream at Ludlow castle to end the day, a day in Wales with a ride on the Llanfair Narrow Gauge Railway and a visit to Powys Castle, the Church Stretton food fayre and ale trail, and a visit to Ironbridge Gorge.

We're now preparing for our next set of visitors. Ric and Jan from Australia are arriving on Friday for about 10 days. We're hoping to do a lot of walking with them, so I'm praying for cooler weather.

Today temperatures got into the mid 30s (well over 90). This is supposed to be the warmest day, a cooler air-mass is on it's way. Unfortunately, it's only predicted to bring hit or miss showers overnight. This is too bad as everything is really dry and parched. A lot of the flowers are rushing to seed as quickly as possible so they can propagate before they die and the whole place is looking green and brown without much colour.

The stream that runs through our garden dried up completely a few days ago. I'd only just discovered life in the stream, too - in the form of fresh-water shrimps hiding under rocks. From the fishy smell coming out of the stream bed I reckon they're mostly demised at this point.

One brilliant point of life and color is the Buddleia bush. I'm sitting beside it right now and it still has a few butterflies and bees sipping nectar. The smell is very pleasant and it's loaded with big purple spikes of flowers. When the sun was on it during the day it was loaded with butterflies and bees, including dozens of peacock butterflies and red admirals. It was a glorious sight. I missed this bush when I was pruning in spring and it's this one that has produced the flowers in abundance. I'm a bit puzzled about that as the accepted wisdom is to prune buddleias back hard each year.

The wind has just picked up a bit. It's still warm (about 27 C or 84F), but the wind helps quite a lot. I can now see some vertical development in the clouds to the east, but since the weather is supposed to come up from the south-west, this isn't very helpful...... John just came out to say that a new batch of storms is developing over Birmingham way. They will be the ones I can see. Come on, guys ..... head this way, please!

We're lucky here as there is no hose-pipe ban. We're being pretty careful, but we have been doing a bit of watering of the things that seem to be the most stressed. Our general philosophy is to let the garden plants sort themselves out. Since these conditions are likely to become more frequent in the future there's no point trying to keep plants that can't tolerate dry conditions. We're letting the lawns go brown, for instance. In this country they'll soon recover when we do get some rain.

In the southeast they have very strict rules about water usage because there is a severe shortage. The problem is not the rainfall of the last few months, which has been adequate, but the loss of water from the chalk aquifers which supply most of the southeast. People here are really annoyed, however, because the water companies are wasting so much water through leakages from the aging pipes. What really irks everyone is that the water companies are making vast profits in spite of the shortages.

Time to go in and watch a telly program.

Talk to you soon ...... bye for now .......

Oh, my aching feet!

Hello, y'all!

We've just returned from a week in Gothenburg (sorry I know that's the English form of the city's name, but I don't have the wherewithal to put in the correct spelling).

We had a smashing time. We went for the 6th International Conference on Urban Climate. We met lots of friends - I won't name them all, but I know that many of you will be interested to know that we met up with Gerald Mills who is hale and hearty and in fine form!

John presented a couple of papers and was in meetings most of the time, so I got to do a lot of wandering about and exploring. During the first couple of days, however, he had some free time and we were able to go about together. The atmospheric picture above was taken just before sun-set and shows one of the main streets of the town with a fountain/statue of Poseidon in the foreground and the towers of the central city in the background. As you can see there's a distinct haze over the city - IT WAS HOT!!!!! We waited for some time to see the sunset, but being that far north it took a lot longer than expected and eventually we left in search of more exiting things.

We found there were a lot of people out on the streets till very late at night. It didn't really get dark till after 11 pm and people stayed on in the outdoor cafes till long after that. This turned out to be especially true on World Cup nights. The night Sweden beat Paraguay the entire town seemed to be out celebrating - chanting, singing, yelling, driving around with horns honking. It was all very friendly and one didn't feel threatened at all - it was just noisy and fun.

John and I walked just about everywhere. And the only problem with that was the cobbled and uneven surface of the pavements (sorry, sidewalks). They really made your feet hurt! I did a little sketch of some of the cobbles one day when I was sitting down by the harbour.

The only time I took the tram was on my second visit to the Botanic Gardens when I was in the company of Janice Ching (I hope that's her last name - she's definitely married to Jason Ching and I never thought to ask if she had a different last name!). Taking the tram gave us more energy to walk around the gardens!

A brief aside here to mention that we had a late night coffee with the Chings early on in the conference and found out that they knew my cousins Peter and Brenda Saunders from the days when they were all at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. What a small world it is!

I really enjoyed the Botanic Gardens. The picture to the left is of the nature reserve part of the gardens. This was wooded with little streams and masses of little white flowers. The more formal part of the gardens was lovely as well. The beds are immaculate and the range of plants very good. We hit the gardens at a particularly beautiful time, I think. I was most impressed by the "Paper Handkerchief Tree" and was able to find the names of several of the plants in my own garden.

Other highlights of the trip included dinners and receptions, with one reception at the very beautifully decorated city hall. However, I think the most interesting was a dinner at Universeum. This is a science museum and we took an after hours tour which included a piece of the South American rain-forest complete with birds, fish and insects, dinner in a hall with sharks swimming alongside us and best of all for me a petting tank where we were able to stroke various rays. These fish actually seemed to like being stroked and scratched. They would swim around the sides of the tanks and wiggle their "wings"! If you put your fingers in the water they would swim up to you and rub against them and they allowed you to touch their backs and underparts. I didn't know that rays had rough skin till I touched it. What a thrill!

On the last afternoon and evening there was a paper session and dinner party to celebrate Tim Oke's retirement. John presented a paper summarizing Tim's contributions to Urban Climate - wow! The dinner was in an indoor market - the food was smashing and the company fun.

And so, it was time to come back. And what did we find? ............. a completely different garden. The late spring stuff had died off - rhododendrons all gone, forget-me-nots turning to seed, poached-egg plant over and done with - and the early summer stuff coming on like a riot!

I was delighted to see the first day-lilly blossom. I associate day-lillies with our time in Columbus. We seem to have lots of them ready to burst into blossom, but I don't know what colors they'll be yet.









Foxgloves are everywhere, especially on the bank of the stream. Along there they are accompanied by daisies, grasses and hypericums and they look like they're in a summer meadow.










And of couse, we can't forget the roses - white ones, pink ones, orange and red - full of scent and varying from the simplest of wild forms to heavy multi-petalled beauties. They're all lovely - scrambling over trellises and trees, cascading down from the bank and just growing in bushy mounds. They should be at their peak in a week or two when Chuck and Hazel come to visit.

Well, that's all for now - gotta go and unpack!

Stay in touch, please!

Summer is here at last!

I wish I could say that I could see this view right now, but I can't. However, summer has really arrived and it's hot for the U.K. There's a haze over the valley this morning and the sun is hot on your skin when you go out .

Out in the garden there is a stillness which we haven't seen before. There's very little wind and although the birds are singing and the bees are buzzing around, things seem very quiet. The stream has quieted down too - we haven't had any rain for a couple of weeks.

Our blue tit family are coming on in their house on our patio. They moved in almost as soon as we put it up. It's a bird house that my Dad put up originally at Ladycroft Walk, and it's really old. But it must be comfortable for blue tits because it's been used by many, many families over the years. It's now covered in Virginia creeper and totally invisible, but we can hear little squeaks from the house and the two adults are busy bringing food. This is good as there are a lot of insects and caterpillars that I need removed from my flowers!

We have a splendid show of rhododendrons right now - one of them must be 20 feet high and almost as wide. It looks like a huge waterfall of mauve blossom.

The lawn is a mass of buttercups (yes, I know that means that the grass is suffering and we'll pay for it later, but it's so pretty!). And there are yellow punctuation marks throughout the garden from buttercups and Welsh poppies. The overall color scheme uses the bronze, purple and pink pallette, so the yellow of these "weeds" really makes it pop!

In another couple of weeks we'll have a crop of gooseberries (if the birds don't get to them first). They're big and plump, but they are still hard so we have to wait a bit longer. We may also get a few strawberries to mix with the last of our rhubarb if we're lucky.

Last week we paid a visit to my old school chum Georgie and her husband Peter. They live in an updated row of quarrymen's cottages about 2 hours north of here. Their house is lovely, with a smashing garden and a view of almost the whole Cheshire plain. We had a lovely visit with some reminiscence, lots of walking, eating and drinking. We're hoping they can join us for a bit of walking and visiting in the fall, but they have busy lives and so do we, so it is sometimes quite hard to get our calendars to match up!

Joy came over this weekend. John was working on a paper so we two "girls" took advantage of the hot and sunny weather and rode off in her open topped car to visit one of our local stately homes - Attingham. It was good fun. We took the tours and learned about riches, corruption and bankruptcy in the Regency era!

To return to the picture of the palm trees. This is something I painted last night at art class. We're really just practicing with watercolor washes, but once I had the orange and yellow "sky" I couldn't resist putting in the palm trees!

The art class has been fun. We're learning techniques at present. First it was using pencils. It's amazing! We've all used pencils since we were little, but you actually have to learn how to use them to draw and shade things.

Now we're learning how to use watercolors. I'm actually quite exited about this and hope to be able to produce a competant piece of work at the end of it. I've never thought of myself as much of an artist, but I do think I'm a craftsman and I should be able to master the craft of drawing and painting.

The hard part is getting the creative ideas and putting them into a drawing, painting or sculpture. I've been hard pressed to have any creative ideas, let alone realise them in the last couple of years.

I did sit down with a pepper mill a few weeks ago and spent several hours working on this drawing. I'm quite pleased with the shading even though the shape is a little off. >

Newsy Bits!

I've just added two posts with pictures of stuff in the garden. I hope that satisfies those of you who are interested in how the spring is progressing over here.

In fact, it's still beastly cold. After a lovely few days of warm sunshine, the rain came back along with a bitterly cold wind. The stream is rollicking along in the way it did last winter - it's lovely to hear the water, but it's a constant reminder of all the rain we've had.

My thumb is a lot better now. I didn't understand that trigger finger is yet another variation on the inflamed tendon theme. Now I know that, I realise that the only way to make it better is to rest it. So all the exercise I gave my thumb was just making it worse. Keeping it splinted for a couple of days allowed the swelling to go down and it's far less sore now. It still "triggers" in the morning and the evening, but I can put up with that. Since the alternative is stopping Arimidex and raising the risk of a recurrence of the breast cancer I don't really have much choice anyway.
We've visited some interesting places lately. Last weekend, with Nancy, we took a walking tour around Shrewsbury. I didn't realise how many old half-timbered buildings there were, nor did I know that Shrewsbury has it's own style of such buildings characterised by rope carvings and recessed quatrfoils. Anyone who's interested and wants to know more can write or visit!

We also took Nancy to Wroxeter, to the site of the Roman town there. All that you can see are the foundations and some of the walls of the bath house, which was a huge basilica about the size of a football pitch. The town itself was huge, but most of it remains unexcavated. It was the 4th largest Roman town in Britain.

This weekend we went to a craft show at Dudmaston Hall near Bridgenorth. It was sunny during our ride there over Wenlock Edge and we enjoyed the countryside and the lovely views. The Hawthorne is in full bloom now so the hedgerows are draped in lovely white blossom. Along the sides of the roads the bluebells and primroses are mostly gone, but there is lots of cow parsley (very similar to Queen Anne's Lace) with its delicate ferny green leaves and large umbels of white flowers.

It was a small show, but we enjoyed it - met and talked to some very nice crafts people and bought a few items for the house. The quality was very good, especially in the tents put up by the Ludlow and Shropshire Crafts organizations. We had lunch outside the hall but didn't visit the house or gardens, although they looked quite interesting. We'll do that on a weekday when it's less crowded.

Well, that'll do for today. Keep those e-mails coming to: joanarnfield@gmail.com.

More Garden Pictures

After I deleted the first set of pictures, I decided to load them up in two attempts. This way, if one fails I haven't lost all my work!

To continue, this stunning Broom is up against the southeast corner of the house. We can't walk down the pathway, but who cares?

Another magnificent specimen is this tree heather. We actually have two of them. The foliage is acid green and the flowers are white.

And now for something completely different - the Poached Egg Plant. This is supposedly an annual which has just come out on our rock garden. If it really is an annual it must be self seeding. I hope so, I really love those blossoms and would hate to loose it.

We have rhododendrons and azaleas in various shades of red, blue, violet, purple and pink. This is a close-up of a particularly pretty one.