Adventures at Windy Acre: Turning the corner

Isn't it amazing how just one tiny thing can bring your focus back?

I know she doesn't look much now...but give her a few months and hopefully she will look like this:

My baby Dahlia merckii arrived yesterday morning - a little extravagant treat which I allowed myself from the Sarah Raven voucher which my sister kindly gave me for my birthday present. It was ordered way back in the chilly days of March, but only dispatched when the warmer, more suitable weather arrived.

Her arrival is a promise of more positive things which will come, no matter how depressing some aspects of the garden seem now. That's one of the best things about gardening really - the seasons roll inexorably on, blossoming, burgeoning, declining, resting, with or without my intervention. It takes the pressure off to remember that, I think. To be reminded that I don't and can't control any of it, I can ride along with it, or step off if I want to. Perhaps grandma's need to be in charge, neat and controlling generally had infiltrated my emotions via the fact that the house and garden feel and look still very much more of her, than of me. I am still feeling very much like a visitor, a caretaker, of someone else's domain.

With the Dahlia's arrival - the first plant I have bought purposefully and consciously for this garden, for the faint and still hazy image I am forming of what I want it to be and how I want it to feel - I realised that the way to make it mine is to work in it and commit myself to it. I realised I have been holding back, waiting, expecting it to happen somehow automatically. But I had been standing back, afraid. I realise now that I must engage - play around with ideas in physical reality - try - fail - and give myself to it.

So, for the last 2 days I have dived in.

The first segment of the bluebell infested circle bed

Welcome to spanish bluebell hell! I have honed my technique and dived in with a determined mission to clear every visible bluebell from this circle bed in the coming week. Although the rose divider border is equally infested (and a couple of other places too) I doubt I will have the chance to fully weed those out before they start to set seed, so for this spring season I may have to simply cut the dying flowers off and dig them thoroughly next year. But the circle bed is the main flower bed seen from the kitchen and lounge windows. It's where I plan to have my bee, insect and bird friendly area. And it's also the place where the bluebells seem to be most successfully suffocating the other plants to death. So I am starting here and focussing down.

It's such a difficult job, and one that I know will need to be done again next spring when any little bit I have missed that has broken off in the soil comes up with a vengeance! So I have also been thinking of the longer term plan of attack here, whilst I have been meditatively weeding away. Tempting though it really is to plant many of my clumps of perennials brought from the old house, I have concluded that this would be foolish to do straight away - despite the invitingly large swathes of apparently bare soil that are appearing as I clear the bluebells (they truly have suffocated most of the plants which were here). This bare soil I will fill with annuals this year - I already have marigolds, nasturtiums, phacaelia and borage germinating in the green house. They were intended for the vegetable patch but I can easily sow more and share the batches around. That why I can weed thoroughly again with impunity next spring, without feeling that I am digging up freshly established planting. The clumps brought from Stone Cottage will be planted in the nursery beds in the vegetable patch instead and hopefully might even have bulked out a little by next year, and I might create more clumps out of them then!

When the rain came down this morning, I turned my new 'just dive in' approach onto the interior.

I decided the way forward would be to unpack all our paintings, photo frames and pictures, and just find somewhere - anywhere - to hang them. My pictures capture the colours and atmospheres that I love, and I usually find that they give me real inspiration for room decorating ideas. I can't think why it didn't occur to me to get them out and on display sooner. Its amazing how, once that state of blind panic 'I don't know where to start' sets in, I really do find myself increasingly unable to take any action whatsoever. I just need to start somewhere. Now the pictures are visible again, I can start to think again.

It's going to be an ongoing process, this one, like constantly shuffling a pack of cards until it feels right. There is at least one more box of smaller frames still to locate and unpack, and of course never a hook in the place where you want one! Oddly, this house is full of picture hooks placed about 2-3 ft from the floor for some reason...

The best kind of bluebell - a chopped off one!

I decided to make a positive out of all the bluebell hatred I have been experiencing, so I stuck a big bunch in a jug. And aren't they pretty? Smell lovely too, so they must be hybrids which have crossed with natives rather than true spanish ones. Such a beautiful colour.

I am very pleased with my big tulip troughs again this year, although I have no idea why the 'Jan Reus' are so much taller than the other 2 varieties! But you really cannot improve upon 'Prinses Irene' when the low afternoon sun illuminates those crimsony purpley flames on the centre of each petal. I knew the little camera wouldn't be able to capture them properly, but I had to try...

And last but not least, I can't resist adding another gratuitous chicken gallery! This time photos taken by E - which make for interesting compositions to say the least, but her lower angle definitely introduces a different feel to the pictures....