I asked god if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thank you god I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph my letters
Sweetcakes she said
Who knows where she got that from
What I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

God Says Yes To Me      Kaylin Haught



(Am working on my own version.)

Thank you J.

The recent glitch with Weebly has made me more aware than ever just how much fun your comments add to my quiet days here.

Thank you.

Rain forecast so I didn't water the garden this evening....

 and hoping you are all still there.

Comments are back! Yay!


I have been known to be desperate for sunshine and now I am seeking respite from it.

I thought I'd take a look at the shady parts of my garden (really only the storage space at the back of the shed during the day) but there are lots of little areas of dappled shade which look delicious in this heatwave we are having, and half way down the path to the shore my little seat was cool and shady for a read in the afternoon...

Hoping you too are having some sunshine and finding shade when you need it.

And if you have the patience to comment on previous posts I'd be most interested and glad to hear from you!

23C is too hot for me! And I am missing you all - wish Weebly would get the comments bug sorted.....

Loving Endangered Pleasures by Barbara Holland (You can read quite a bit on Amazon to check if it appeals to your sense of humour!)

Meanwhile Weebly engineers are working on the bug which prevents us commenting - I hope you'll save your thoughts to share when they have it fixed - I do love the conversations we have here..

I am missing your comments but Weebly are working on it I think (if slowly...) Maybe they too are caught up in all of this -

You will all be getting messages like this too - all CAPITALS, bold and italics and exclamation marks !!!

This is your very last chance     Me - no it isn't
We won't be able to contact you   Me - hurrah
Act now!! .. Me - No!

It brings out the worst in me I fear.

I am using the data protection act changes to clear out a lot of unwanted clutter from my email. How did Waitrose find me anyway? I never signed up for this.  My nearest Waitrose is two hours away and they certainly don't deliver here.....

But I will be careful not to lose the things I like to receive  and appreciate the need for changes.

And I'll post some photographs later today..

Keep smiling.


Views from the hammock on a very hot day....I think the hammock may be my favourite thing in the garden.

The most relaxed I've been in months.

I hope you have a relaxing weekend.

Things which made me smile today

The evening light
A tomato called Oh Happy Day
Sarah Price's garden at Chelsea
Picking a bunch of mint to put with some bought roses
My gardening friends helping me today
Learning they can make biodegradable plastic from algae
Hot sunshine and the promise of more
Watering the lawn

What made you smile today?
I hereby resolve to smile even more tomorrow.
Because it makes me feel good
and
makes everyone else feel good too
and
it's free
and
it's easy.

Join me?!


Not smiling about the glitch that means I cannot reply to your comments at the moment. Sorry about that..working on it.

 
I have about ten acers in the garden,mostly in pots and while the log store is empty I thought some of them looked rather nice in there....As I do with my paintings I like to move my plants around.

Do you move your plants around, in house or in garden? Or your paintings? Or perhaps your furniture?

This one however stays in the same place as it covers a tree stump which was too big to remove.

The good gardening weather continues!

I thought I'd link again to an Emil Pakarklis' video on using the iPhone camera.

I wanted to show the beautiful detail on my cup and saucer and found the tips on adjusting focus and exposure at the same time really helpful. Not quite got it - can't get both accurate colour (3rd photo) and the light shining on the gilding (4th) - but better than before..
.

The iPhone can do so much more than I realised and he explains it very well!

Enjoying watching the Chelsea Flower Show - especially the behind the scenes growers' trials and tribulations...

I can't see beyond the end of my trowel lately and have loved being out of doors most of the time. I find myself going to bed when it gets dark, and waking with the dawn and wonder if this is a natural bodily response to being outside and doing physically tiring work.

Indoors I am gradually reviewing my paintings, deciding what to keep and what to sell.

If like me you move your paintings frequently this tip might be useful for filling the many small holes in the walls.  Most of my walls are white and rubbing a piece of white chalk over the hole fills the hole and smudging it with my finger blends the rest into the wall - almost invisible (and good enough till I next get round to redecorating).

I prefer rhododendrons in the vase rather than in the garden...

Isn't it lovely when the main news of the day is love and happiness?

I hadn't planned to celebrate, but at the last minute I made a few cakes

looked out a pretty cloth and that gorgeous tea set I found in the charity shop

made some tea and sat down and watched the whole thing.

 Dazzled by the smiles, the dress, the flowers- loved the flowers, the sunshine and the sheer happiness and exuberance of the whole event.

Did you watch?

I hope they will have a long and happy marriage.

and in every garden, you do from time to time lose some.

It's just a pity when it is a star plant and four weeks to Open Day!

But viburnum 'Davidii' a very handsome shrub, despite being weighed to the ground by snow more than once this winter is looking splendid by the front door. The flowers are followed by berries of an amazing blue and the evergreen leaves are beautifully veined. Unlike viburnum tinus which smells so awful I wouldn't grow it, this has no scent.

Viburnum plicatum 'Mariesii' I love for it's horizontal form. This was a beautiful specimen, so perfect that we spent some time clearing away other things from around it to show off it's form and 'honour it with it's own space'.

I had hoped that it was just late coming into leaf but since these few leaves appeared on a low branch it became clear the rest was dead. It took many years to grow to this size and leaves a big gap.

But I have an idea....

Planning my gardening day I sat here and heard a woodpecker, the wren which I think is nesting in clematis 'Freda' and I watched a deer delicately pick its way up into the forest through that patch of sunlight on the right there.  I imagined it's forest life so different from mine yet so close.

Jennie saw a deer jump lightly over the yellow gate early one morning. I guess it owns the place as much as I do...

Today's list under my four headings for garden work -

An Ongoing Job - weeding the lawn which is again and at last beginning to be worthy of the name after some very intensive care!

A Start and Finish Job - tidying the edges of the cutting patch and consolidating the ground (trampling it) ready for some better-late-than-never seed sowing - gypsophila, poppies, cornflowers, night scented stock, marigolds, nasturtiums....after a couple of disappointing seasons I am giving it one last shot...

A Job I Want To Do - I think I will plant up a hanging basket just with trailing lobelia. I've seen it looking very pretty and have been meaning to try it for years.

A Rescue Job - there are always things to be rescued here! Today I think it will be the space at the back of the shed. Having emptied the compost bins onto the cutting patch, it's pretty messy back there.

Meanwhile there are some pretty bits and pieces - some planned some just happen - like the self sown things on the greenhouse floor...

to gardener, plantswoman and writer Beth Chatto who died a few days ago aged 94.

She was an artist with plants and I loved her garden. After my first visit there many years ago I wrote to her to say how much I liked it and was surprised and delighted to receive a charming hand written reply to my letter.

She was successful on the micro level - her detailed descriptions of plants and flowers made you want to really look closely at every one, and on the macro level - her extensive garden is a  brilliant composition and all about the plants. In between in scale I saw one of her gold medal winning stands at Chelsea - a masterly arrangement of form and colour (a skill she cleverly describes well in terms of asymmetric triangles).

I've read all her books and trust them completely.

She has inspired so many people. Have you visited her garden or read her books?

Bear with me as they say, for I am still on about Venice!

I am passionate about Venice - it just happened. I did not need to try (I just needed to be there).

(Can I just add here that a friend who has been reading the comments recently said 'How did they all get to be so wise?')


I loved the cookery book Polpo as much for it's information about Venice as for the food and knew that I would want to eat cicheti at a bacaro (see the Polpo story here) - the kind of place Venetians will stop at on the way home from work, maybe with a colleague or meeting a friend, for a glass of local wine or a spritz and some delicious small snacks.  I was delighted to find that one of Russell Norman's recommended bacari was on the street right below our apartment!

I had also read somewhere about a cafe in a greenhouse (Serra di Giardini) and found it quite easily (Vaporetto stop Giardini). We enjoyed a lunch  and an aperol spritz there on a sunny warm day - so sunny they had to lower the wonderful blinds...

Neither place was expensive.

I am passionate about writing Live Simply Simply Live!

I asked some questions in this post and was most interested in your answers...

I think perhaps passion is in large part commitment, and hope that by choosing to commit I can revive the passion and enthusiasm I once felt for most things I did (teaching, patchwork and quilting, gardening and landscape design, painting..).

I am working madly in the garden having agreed to opening it for charity in a moment of nostalgia for the fun Barry and I had doing this over a number of years.

On my own it just felt like hard work.

Remembering that old 'act as if' adage, I wondered if I acted as if I was still passionate about it - that is if I did the things I did when I was passionate about it - gave it my full attention, did the research, sowed the seeds, made the decisions, tried different plant combinations, really loved and looked after the plants, put in the hours....would the passion return?

Bereavement it seems to me, takes away the extra energy, the surplus of energy a person needs to feel these feelings of enthusiasm.

I pay for help with grass and hedge cutting (must sell more paintings),  Jennie helps me plan and divide and plant, friends offer help and I accept gladly and slowly, slowly my interest and pleasure in it are returning.

Watch this space.

I am watching the dawn again! I was so tired from gardening I went to bed really early and here I am at 5am on what looks like being another good day....

Balancing the sorrows and the joys
The ugliness with beauty and goodness
The hard work with the rewards
I spent the day divided equally between the moss mountain

and the hammock

Well maybe I spent longer in the hammock, but it was hot and taking out two heaped barrowloads of moss was hard work..
I hope you found a happy balance in your day.

Thank you for all the interesting comments on yesterday's post. It's a huge and I think very important subject.

Could the current  'mental health crisis'. especially among young people, be about too much information? I have said before that I don't believe human beings are designed to cope with the world's bad news on the hour every hour 24/7. How do we decide who to listen to? And what information to trust?

I was very interested in what Madeleine Albright has to say in her new book.

It reminds me of this quote (attributed to Edmund Burke)

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

It makes me feel I have to be engaged. Perhaps I too am an optimist who worries a lot!

Meanwhile I limit my news to once a day maximum, at a time of my own choosing. I find 'Beyond 100 Days' from BBC1 interesting.  I'll intersperse with regular Mozart days though...

Balance is everything and the point of balance is different for everyone. It's up to us to find our own.


(Thank you M for that link)

One of the joys of my Amazing April was that for weeks I did not hear about he-who-shall-not-be-named (and whose tweets I refuse to read any more) or Brexit.

I blithely choose to have a totally news-free day and listen to Mozart instead, but the issue of trying to be a well informed, politically aware citizen has never been more difficult to resolve.

How do I manage it and stay sane?

This must be why I woke so early..

 
Our village contingent of swallows returned today from Africa - a little flock noisily wheeling about then 'our two' diving straight into the nesting place above the studio window. Isn't it amazing that they can do that? It occurs to me I have just had the gutters cleaned and that is probably where they find the mud to mend their nests. Oh dear. Sorry swallows!

I could hear a cuckoo further up the glen, and saw the first butterfly - white, but too big to be an orange tip.

Gorgeous sunny day again and I've been clearing and weeding and dividing and planting and watering....

It is so lovely to have the doors and windows open, and Mozart wafting out.

And to think about the hammock and check if it survived the winter..

And a sundowner. Cheers!

Everything is better with sunshine and Mozart!

The odd shape on the grass is the evening sunshine reflected from the study window!

I have no choice about the sunshine - so beautiful today - but (and how astonished Mozart would have been) I can have Mozart whenever I like. I have plenty to choose from.

I think I will have a Mozart day tomorrow.

All day.

Loud.

No news. None.

Divine.

..indoors and out.

My birthday lilies are still scenting the house but outside there is a wonderful scent all around. People look for blossom, but it the new leaves of the balsam poplar which scent the air. I can smell it at my back door although the two trees, in the centre of the photograph are at least 50 mtrs away. I often cut a few little branches but there are thick brambles underneath, and the house is full of scent anyway so not this year.

Meanwhile the greenhouse is filling up nicely...and tulip 'Purissima' is changing from a deep cream to a purer white, as it matures.

It's 3.47 and the cloud hasn't lifted all day.

Are you getting some sunshine?

..I love it.

Spotted from the bus somewhere between Fort William and Loch Lomond..