A word from our sponsor!

Allo? Allo?

*taps glass of Ipad* *clears throat and draws herself up to most regal posture*

"Bonjour, Messieurs-Dames.

My name is Margot, and I will be your spokes-chicken for today.

It is with great pride zat I announce ze official opening of our shop, managed by 'At The Cottage Gate' Enterprises!

We will now be stocking a tantalising supply of ze finest eggs, produced with care and great effort by possibly ze most pampered chickens in ze Northern 'Emisphere (what? what is zis rubbish? who wrote zis press release?)...Ahem...Please note zat delivery to ze colonies is not available at zis time.  (Apologies to our antipodean subscribers).

Unfortunately, I am afraid zat I will be unable to greet you all personally at ze gate to congratulate you on your excellent taste in purchases.  I am usually extremely busy in my 'igh level role within ze production team (if you see an egg of excellent size, brown with artistically scattered dark brown freckles ZAT'S ONE OF MINE!  It takes me hours to decide where ze freckles will look best, you know.  Every one is an individually created work of art!)...Ze others say I take so long in ze nesting box because I'm contemplating my navel (do I 'ave a navel?) but actually zey are just jealous because, of course, my eggs are ze best...

Zey also say unkind things: zat I am bossy and bad tempered and NOT REALLY FRENCH!!!...Zat I put on my French accent to appear more exotic and exciting... (alright, so my father was a Rhode Island Red, but I take after my mother!)

I also enjoy dust bathing in ze sunshine, relaxing on my chaise longue, digging up ze garden, AND WORLD PEACE.

Vote Margot for Chicken of ze Month!"

Oh dear - she might have got a bit carried away with her PR role, I fear.

But yes! The excitement peaked as we were forced by excessive egg production this week, into launching my honesty box 'shop' slightly early and well before the Engineer has even begun to create my protective table/shelf thingy. Also, my emergency sign is definitely a bit on the small side...but needs must.  I shall work towards a nice blackboard sign and pretty table.

One customer so far (the school bus driver) and the atmosphere of excitement in the coop is unbelievable - but if we can at least gain enough money towards the chicken feed, I shall consider myself blessed.

Diary catch up #10: Not enough DEMOLITION for you? There's more...

It was a bit like waiting for the Number 42 bus round here in January.  You stand patiently in the queue for 6 months, and then WHAM! Two large, dusty, disruptive demolition projects come along at once.

With the floorboards still up in the Snug Room, the carpet and other random bits and bobs dumped across the (already fairly chaotic) floor in the 'spare' bedroom, we got the call from the Chimney Man to say he was ready to come to us now.  Not for the chimney we had just opened up in the Snug, you'll understand - oh no, that would be far too organised - but for the fireplace in the Hall/Dining Room.  Of course, silly me. Having planned this work since July, it all happens in probably the coldest week of the year...

Before - not too bad, I suppose, but very 70's and more importantly the stove is tiny for this huge space with its open staircase, and has to be watched and fed with small logs constantly to keep the fire going.

So here we are, as much furniture out as could be moved, plastic sheet up to try and contain the inevitable dust and soot.  Don't worry - I remembered to take the curtains down!

The calm before the storm

Isn't it incredible how quickly a man and a lump hammer can destroy something once they get started? Barely 10 minutes in, and the copper hood is off along with most of the white plastered chimney breast.

It was at this point that they discovered 'more than they bargained for': a wall of old bricks going up inside the inglenook flue, built there at some point in order to reduce the width of the flue to improve the draw of the chimney when the smaller inner chimney breast was put in to create a smaller fireplace.

This could have been catastrophic for us (due to the cost) - it looked at first as if this 'inner wall' went all the way up the chimney.  But our intrepid chimney men clambered up as far as they could inside the flue and found it only went up another 6-7 feet, and then the bend of the original flue curved in and the bricks stopped - whew!

Even so, removing all those extra bricks with hammer and chisel took an extra hour or so.

The haul of bricks from the inglenook 'secret wall' - a new greenhouse base perhaps?

Once they were all gone, you could stand in the inglenook and look up the chimney to the (icy blue and freezing cold) winter sky.  And you could also stand in the room, with the icy chill of this massive new opening from the house to the outside world - and realise just why people had been so keen to block up these enormous open chimneys.

That done, the chaps could press on with removing the rest of the 'ornamental' stonework - the aim was to take the inglenook back to it's original form.

We were hoping that the herringbone brick hearth went all the way underneath, that they had built the ornamental stuff over the top.  They removed the side walls - the herringbone went underneath! Hurray!

They looked at me.  Should they remove the brick hearth that had been built on top of the herringbones, or leave it in place? We decided to take away the corner bricks and see if the pattern carried on under...It did! So wallop! went the sledgehammer to lift the whole lot.  You've guessed it - the herringbone bricks promptly disappeared into a mess of infilled cement.

Drat and botheration.

Looks like the herringbone hearth had been damaged over the years by the old fire grate which would have sat directly on top of it, when the inglenook was an true open inglenook.  So when it was 'improved' in later years, they simply blobbed a load of cement in and built a new brick hearth on the top.  Typical.  So we had just removed a hearth that we would now have to rebuild.

The herringbone brick hearth - you can see the paler areas (before I had scrubbed it all clean) where the ornamental walls used to stand on top.  And you can see where they peter out about 6 inches under where the newer hearth used to be

It could have been worse.  The herringbones might have stopped at the ornamental walls, and then we would have had to have a whole new hearth built on top to make it all level.

The rest of the old bread oven opening was also revealed! It must have been bricked up when the two cottages were knocked into one, and the space where the bread oven cavity was, is now our little hallway through from this room into the lounge and kitchen.

The other half of the bread oven opening

At the end of Inglenook Renovation Day 1 - but we have the delights of the fully open inglenook flue for 24 hours with the sub-zero late January temperatures to make the experience even more authentic!

Day 2 of the works involved lots of tweaking and colourful language as the new steel register plate was fitted to seal off the cavernous flue from the room - quite a feat of engineering, given the size - and naturally, nothing is square.  Then came even more colourful language as the mammoth operation to cut a core through the 2 foot + thick wall was done with the core drill.  Don't we just love the Buildings Regulations? As if a house like this needs even more ventilation??? But thems the rules...

New brick hearth on to cover the mess below, and some render applied to the middle rear section of the wall which had similarly been damaged by the hundreds of years of smoke and heat, and had also been 'repaired' in the past by bodging with dodgy ugly brickwork.  My intention is to rake out and refresh the pointing on the remaining stone before the whole is probably painted up, as the rest is already painted and then the new patch of render will be covered at the same time.  But that's a job for the warmer weather when we don't need to use the woodburner.

At last the new woodburner and stovepipe went in, and finally it started to look slightly less like a disaster film and become more promising.  There is always that moment, isn't there, when a big job is fully underway - beyond the point of no return - even when you have planned, and thought and wished and waited for it, that you stand back and get that awful lump rising in your throat.  The one that screams 'What on earth have we done?' Panic sets in as it all looks so dreadful and problems are rising faster than your brain can deal with them. You forget the end vision you had when you started.  You can do nothing but flail about in the enormity of the mess.

At the end of Inglenook Renovation Day 2 - Workmen gone, mess gone - but the cleaning of the walls and carpet begin.  Thank heavens for the steam cleaner and the knowledge that this carpet is 'just for now'...

A wider angle shot of the same - to try to help me get some perspective back! With the curtains back up and the piano back into use, it reminds me that this IS Better, WILL BE much better, and a more comfortable and welcoming room with a much more effective heat source, along with a simpler, more rustic look that I can feel is mine. (It is also a good shot to show the little hallway through what used to be the solid back wall of this first cottage, where the bread oven cavity used to be, as I described earlier)

As is always the way, once the furniture is back, the children and animals are the ones who show you how much better it actually is:

I still can't get some of the marks out of the carpet (even though the chimney men brought their own thick sheets and were very good at tidying up as they went along).  It has more builders' boots to put up with in the coming year, so I'm not being too precious about it.  Once all the work is done, this old carpet will go and we will have a nice new one.

But it is soooooo nice to have this fire on all day, keeping the core circulation areas of the house warm and aired, and the children immediately settle here when they come in from school for a hour of jigsaw, knitting, guitar strumming or reading in front of the fire.  If they can get on the chair, that is.  The warmth even makes coercion to piano practice slightly less painful...but only slightly!

To finish, I couldn't resist sharing this photo of my birthday morning, when I was presented with this intriguingly shaped parcel as my main present:

Is it..? Could it really be...? At last, my own Nimbus 2000...????!!!

There was a moment of concern that it might possibly be a new hoover.  Surely not? He wouldn't be that cruel? (After the 'new fridge' anniversary present, you'll forgive me for a moment's hesitation).

Happily not.

No Nimbus 2000 either, though - much to the children's disappointment.

But instead - oh joy - a Brassica Cage!!!

We gardeners are so easy when it comes to ideas for presents. He doesn't realise how lucky he is.  There is at least one other lady of my acquaintance who would expect no less than a nice new expensive handbag and a weekend in Paris for her birthday.... xxx

Diary catch up #9: Starting 2015 as we mean to carry on - with DEMOLITION

As New Year's Day 2015 dawned bleary eyed, there was the muffled sound of preparations being made downstairs...

I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep.

Apparently he had left us all to sleep 'a reasonable amount' (i.e. it was now 9am and his fingers were twitching) but he could wait no more - the Engineer needed to respond to those pesky New Year urges and demolish things!

He had 4 days or so before he had to go back to work.  It seems his intention was to try and get it all done in that time...ha haa haa....

Welcome, good people, to Project Snug

Here we are with the 'Before' shot, although of course as I was still in bed I only got to take this after he had done his sheeting up.

The Snug - ready for the off

Not surprisingly, I can't find any photos of this room truly 'Before', as it was so horrible and nasty that we never even put any furniture in here ourselves when we moved in.  This is the damp room (along with the bedroom above) for which all the scary remedial work was needed to the outside walls - the blasting, repairing and repointing of last summer and autumn.  Take my word for it - you wouldn't have wanted to put your furniture in here either!  The corner between the chimney breast and the window was the worst area by far, although the whole of that chimney breast wall was decidedly iffy, those areas have started to dry out amazingly well already.

The fastest ever bit of work was taking out the old dry-lined corner - obviously an attempt to deal with the problem of the damp wall many years ago.  I was absolutely paranoid what might have been growing behind this plasterboard! Lady Luck seems to have been with us on this one though - not too bad and no evil rots!

Dry lining on the south east corner wall removed

Next came the much more entertaining (well, for me anyway) knocking off of the delightful 1970's ornamental stone pyramid on the chimney breast...Easier said than done, once it became evident that whatever was used to cement the stones together was designed to withstand a direct hit from a nuclear warhead.

Pyramid removed - hurray!

That took the rest of the first day, and was finished off the next morning.  Revealing beneath an 'interesting' brick chimney breast structure that had been altered several times in the past, it seems:

What lies beneath...A possibly late Victorian/Edwardian fireplace opening that has been narrowed down at a later date, probably by Grandad when he had the Baxi fire installed in the early 70s.  Later this was reduced even further, for the nasty inset woodburner that Grandma wasted her money on about 5 years ago.  However, there is a weird pattern in the brick work higher up the chimney breast that looks like there was a different arrangement here before the Victorian opening was created.  Our builder has suggested that it may have been a much higher lintel arch originally, perhaps to accommodate a small cooking stove or pot belly type that could take a kettle on the top.  

Sadly what we found needs quite some repointing of the brick work (you can poke your fingers through into the flue in many places) and we seem also to have reached the limit of what the Engineer is happy to do in the way of knocking out himself - he prefers to have someone with greater building skill knock the fireplace back to the Victorian opening, and then make it good so that we can move the little woodburner from the hall/dining room into here.

His destructive attentions moved swiftly on to the remaining peeling damp paper and loose plaster on the front corner:

Don't you just love those black painted beams? Very Ye Olde pub interior

This is the place which is the slowest drying out - it appears to be very gradually drying to a circle which is still quite dark, and we can't work out why.  We decided to scrape off all the lining paper and knock off anything that was loose and seemed 'blown'.  We discovered an odd situation of past repairs where new layers of gypsum plaster had been skimmed thickly straight on top of older (damp) lining paper...I cease to be surprised in this house.

The Engineer bravely knocked off as much as he could, without resorting to power tool assistance.  But quite large areas are incredibly well adhered - so much so that he felt hammering at them with force might result in half the stone wall underneath coming away too.  So an executive decision was made: to leave the well adhered and hold a watching brief over the rest of the time we spend renovating this room.  That way it can continue drying out and may be fine as it is.  We expect it to be several months while we are working on the floor and chimney here, so plenty of time to wait and see.

At last I managed to catch him in action, for the record!

The Engineer - international man of mystery rarely seen this side of the camera lens

The result of all his hard work - 3 solid days...so far...

Little did I realise, that was just the warm up.

Fast forward to the following weekend and next came up the floorboards...

...another fun job involving running the circular saw along every single joint to take the tongues off the boards (no nice straightforward straight edge floorboards for us, oh no no no! These aren't 'original' Victorian type boards - this floor has been replaced before, unfortunately for us, with tongue and groove boards...), and then more enjoyable fun lifting the boards with his new man toy floorboard lifter thingy.

Turns out, when his dad built the crazy paved stone hearth, he did it on top of the floorboards in that area. To be able to lift them all (which was necessary to be able to insulate beneath, the purpose of this exercise), he had to come and break the news to me that he was going to have to remove the hearth too. Arrggggghhhh.

Can Of Worms, anyone?

The Crystal Maze inspired 'solution' to how to lift the hearth and be able to hopefully relay it later

A brief family trip to the garden centre - returning with a woeful lack of tempting plant purchases, but instead £30 worth of pond netting - apparently the weapon of choice for the discerning DIYer who wishes to suspend his underfloor insulation correctly, maintaining the clear ventilation below...

Can I just ask - what did we do before Youtube and the Internet? The Engineer's treasured dog-eared 1987 edition of the Guinnes Step-by-Step Guide to DIY just cannot compete.

Retro-fitting the insulation underneath the suspended timber floor.  Looking at this, it is no wonder the room was so cold and draughty! The breeze from the three ventilation grilles used to whistle up between the floorboards and the skirting, whilst also keeping the surface of the floor below the carpet fairly chilly too.  Add to that the general dampness of the walls...
But one thing was true - the good ventilation appears to have saved the timber from rot.  An achievement to be celebrated, considering the incredible level of moisture there before the remedial work was done - water was all but trickling out of the stone when you chipped off areas of the old exterior paint coating.

This was a dirty, scratchy, horrible job - the Engineer, bless him, tackled it single-handedly while I was charged with keeping the little blighters entertained safely elsewhere and out of his way.  Fibre insulation and children do not a happy combination make.

The vapour barrier went down and then the boards back on top - which is pretty much where we still are now.  It has been fiddly slow work for him filling the gaps left between the floorboards (having removed the tongues, of course they now effectively are square edged boards, but much less well fitting than before!), but a task which he wanted to do thoroughly and effectively.  After all, the whole point of this is to improve the comfort value of the floor.  Putting the skirting boards back on is causing more headaches, but I admit I have not helped matters by constantly demanding bits and bobs of outdoor jobs here and there, which are becoming increasingly pressing as the season moves ahead and the weather is improving - oops.

I will attempt to take a reasonable picture of the current state of play in the Snug Room tomorrow in the daylight, just to keep these records up to date xxx

Here we are - as it is at the moment.  Not too pretty, admittedly, but Rome wasn't built in a day! Hopefully over the next few days, if I'm lucky, there may be further advancement on the Snug Project - fingers are firmly crossed.

Diary catch up #8: December and our first festive season at Windy Acre!

You know how I said now that the weather is turning, all outdoor house-related jobs were ended? It seems that wasn't true...

The front porch roof sprang a leak!!!

Not at all what you want at the BEGINNING of winter.  And to be ignored at our peril.  There was nothing for it but to get the ladders out again and take advantage of a usefully dry and sunny Sunday afternoon to lift of some of the roof tiles and have a look.

This is what we found:

Well, that's not exactly the truth.  This is what it looked like after the Engineer had brushed away the masses of accumulated debris of leaf litter and twigs that had gathered along the battens.  I think the bitumen felt had been more intact before he did that - but with the simple pressure of his hand it just disappeared into bits!

I knew I had been right to remove the wisteria from that corner, I had seen it clambering under the gutter and into the roof during the summer. I suspect it had started to make it's way carefully through the dissolving felt, as truly only the insidious stems of wisteria can...and a lot of the debris was definitely the dead leaves and stems from that.  But there was lots more - either the wind had really been pushing leaves under the tiles and then they had got stuck around the wisteria stems, or a little feathered culprit had perhaps been 'assisting' the accumulations.

But I imagine it was my impatient tugging from below of the wisteria to get it out of the roof that did the final damage and created a hole through which the rain could then trickle - as it is about a month since I removed the wisteria, and we've only really had proper rain in the last few weeks.

I'm shocked at the state of the felt though - it is terribly brittle, and this roof is one of the 'newer' ones, done in the mid 1990s.  I do hope this doesn't mean that all the 1990s re-roofed sections are this bad.

So, as the daylight trickled (too quickly) away, the Engineer cobbled together a temporary fix by removing the batten, putting on a more rigid piece of the plastic floor protection stuff we use for multiple purposes (in order to stop the felt sagging any more over the top of the cavity wall) and then patched on some new felt that had been left behind after the bathroom roof was done.  New batten on the top - and all done!  Not quite...it then took us a further hour of swearing and jiggery pokery to get the tiles to sit back properly under the lead. This roofing lark is not as easy as the builders make it look, you know.

Hopefully this should see us through the winter, and then a 'proper repair' can be added to the growing list of next year's jobs...

After that, I needed cheering up so turned my attention to creating our Special Christmas Cards - the few I make for immediate family, I like to use one of my own paintings for.  Last year it was my Brambly Hedge inspired version of our big kitchen inglenook corner at the old house, complete with comfy fireside chair and glimpse of the table with suitably festive fayre.  I haven't done any pictures of this house yet (too tired and lacking inspiration until we've made it more 'ours'), so I chose one I'd done in painting class of a winter village:

My 'Winter Village' for the Christmas cards this year - I think it captures the mood of this year for us quite well.  Slightly mournful, but the chaos of the mud and snow covered road leads on to the promise of a shelter where you can hunker down against the elements, and 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' !

That job always feels to me like the real start of the festive period, and once done, I'm raring to go on the decorations.

I was VERY well behaved. I promise.  Even though there are more mantlepieces here to decorate...lots of beams that need stuff hanging from them...and many more deep windowsills that are yearning for magazine inspired festive beautification.  I didn't buy any new decorations.  I forced myself not to - I said we would make do with what we had this year, as who knows what new decorations might be essential once the renovations and building work are (eventually) finished?  Evie did a roaring trade in gorgeous red and white twisted paper stardrops, working all by herself following the instructions in one of the many Christmas magazines that had found their way into my trolley.

Alright, I did buy some more fairy lights.  Two more sets actually, I confess.  But I left it until the last week before Christmas and the supermarket were 'selling off' their Christmas decorations half price! Madness - we hadn't even passed the Big Day yet and they were clearing the shelves - no doubt ready for the Valentine's Day stock...

But I found the extra lights essential, as the daylight weakenend every day, the small deep windows let in less and less light and the interior, especially in the daytime, looked sadder, shabbier and gloomier.  We needed twinkling lights and swags of greenery!!!

The lounge inglenook proved the most troublesome - no mantleshelf to hang the decorations from!  A begging request had to be made in triplicate to the Engineer for some nails to be put in the beam.  He wasn't happy, but it was essential.  The old artificial garland that had served so well over the mantle of the old lounge chimney was a bit short for this one, so I added extensions of ivy twined around the light cables to hide them.

Our twiggy star, which makes it feel properly Christmas

Outside, I knew I would miss the old open porch and it's ideal support of the dressing of the front door. What to do here?

I knew I would be working on giving the big lilac bushes a hard renovating prune over the coming months. So I decided they wouldn't mind me stealing a few big branches early, and I jammed them into the wooden planters to create a woodland fairy-realm style natural porch, which was quite strong enough to support the lights on their wires.  Fortunately (!) there are plenty of gaps around the door (even with draught excluder stuck on) through which I was able to feed the power cable...

A bit dainty perhaps, but it did the job.

Our Woodland Fairy style Christmas porch

Joy of joys! To be able to use holly and cypress from our own garden to make a wreath for the door!  I'll admit, I was far more excited about this than a grown woman should be.  It just underlines what I've suspected all along - I evidently haven't grown up yet - that explains why I haven't decided what I will be when I do...

I was very happy with my homemade homegrown wreath! I made me smile every time I went through the door  even if anyone trying to use the door knocker got a nasty stab in the hand

I cooked Christmas dinner myself for the first ever time.  No photos of that - I was so exhausted I doubt I could have held the camera steady... But it tasted fine! I didn't poison anyone!

Still wobbly from my Christmas cooking exertions, we headed north to Sheffield on Boxing Day, in time for my sister's birthday celebrations.  It turns out we were very lucky with the weather on our journey - dry, cloudy, but no traffic issues.

Two hours after we arrived safely, it did this:

...and the city ground to a painful halt.  My sister and her family left early from mum and dad's to try to get home across the other side of town.

Three hours later, at 11.50pm, they arrived back with us, having only managed to get a mile along the first dual carriageway.  They made the sensible decision to turn around at the first roundabout instead of going on and risking a cold night stranded in the car (as it turns out many people did that night).  But we did have fun squeezing 10 people to sleep in a 2 bedroom bungalow that can sleep 6 at a push...! Fortunately the Boy Scout Engineer never allows us to leave home without a duvet and blankets in the back of the van, and the sofa bed in the lounge has an extra 'topper' which we were able to put down on the floor and the children slept on that, just like camping... We kept the heating on through the night so that we wouldn't feel the thinner blankets and the floor.

Even the next day it still took them hours to get home - many of the roads couldn't be cleared by the snow ploughs as the abandoned cars were blocking them.

But one person at least was really happy:

Snowman 1 - in the front garden

Snowman 2 - in the back garden

Hilarious really.  I had had to put to bed a sobbing (overtired and overexcited) small boy on Christmas Eve because it wasn't snowing.  I had had to explain to him that snow at Christmas was actually not that common.  Just because there was always snow on Christmas cards, and in films, didn't mean that here where we lived it was normal... We are more likely to have snow in February than December.  Just because by some fluke of nature 4 out of the 6 Christmasses he can actually remember did have snow - didn't help me in this mission.

Then we drive to Sheffield and it does this!  What can a mummy do?

Bracing snowy walk in Sheffield - amazing how quiet it is without the background noise of the traffic

Diary catch up #7: Inspirational end of autumn visit to Knoll Gardens in Dorset

At the tail end of November, my parents came down to visit for a week, and mum loves a good garden visit especially if it can be enjoyed at leisure (ie without the encumbrance of a grumbling spouse who is only in it for the coffee and cake at the end...), so we often take advantage, leave dad with the children and 'do a garden' just us two.

Now, despite our  part of the world being well endowed with fabulous gardens to visit - you practically stumble over one around every corner here in Somerset alone, never mind the offerings within an hour's striking distance into Devon, Dorset and Wiltshire - however, options with appeal in the tatty end of November are fewer!  Many are closed in the 'off' season and for the ones that remain open all year round naturally the focus tends to be on the Landscape Garden area or the Woodland Walks, etc.  All of which the Engineer and I still enjoy and are ideal for marching the children around when they need to have an enforced change from the telly and the dreaded computer.

But mum's poor hip joints are not really up to a route march, and her interests tend more towards the ornamental garden scale.  She prefers lovely borders and shrubs, and a more domestic viewpoint.  But these are the very parts of the grand gardens which look much like our own gardens look in November - half dead, brown, limp and decidedly dormant!

However, I had seen in a magazine an article about Knoll Gardens near Wimborne in Dorset, which was a little further afield than our normal forays (I thought about an hour and a half, but actually it took us 2 hours to drive there), but is generally in mum and dad's former stomping ground (they spent many years in Dorset when dad was based in Poole as a Royal Marine).  More to the point, the garden focusses on the many ways to use grasses of all types and aims to be as year-round attractive as is possible - the grasses still standing and looking stunning while 'dead and dying' and only being cut back in February - and as I was quite interested in investigating using more grasses when the circle bed is eventually 're-done' I was keen to have a look at the display at this 'bad' time of year.  After all, if it can still look attractive at the end of November, then that would certainly sell the idea of grass-focussed planting to me.

Of course I took hundreds of photos - mainly for my own information to help me remember what certain plants were, and how they looked when they are 'dead'!

These are just a taster of the feel of the display gardens, the bits I particularly liked or felt appropriate to my own circumstances here at Windy Acre.  Different sections of the garden are planted up to demonstrate the various habitats and soil conditions and which species of grasses were best suited to those conditions. It's all about 'right plant, right place'.  But for me, another valuable aspect was the introduction throughout the garden of grasses with established shrubs, not just the perennial companions we often see them placed with in delicious designer gardens.  Windy Acre has a lot of established shrubs, so this was really illuminating for me to see different ways to approach plant groupings.

This photo I took especially for the Engineer - it's a family joke now, but we all know he appreciates a log pile in any location and scenario.  Even Leo suggests stopping the car occasionally on long journeys when he has spied a wood yard or log pile 'so that daddy can go and have a look  at it'...

But for me too - I do love a shrub with berries! I assumed this one was some sort of cotoneaster, but there was no label on it.

I was very intrigued by this grouping of spindle tree, abelia and grass clumps - I would never have put the shapes together but they worked really well

One of my favourite areas - a row of what must have once been specimen hollies, simply underplanted the full length of the holly 'hedge' with stipa arundinacea like a swathe of bronzey green, contrasting amazingly with the more rigid and sculptural feel of the hollies.

This pond garden area took our breath away - everything looked fantastic, even after the miserable lashing wet weather of the last few weeks.

I loved the mixture here in this extremely shady spot of the ferny conifer draping itself through the hypericum branches. These are just the sorts of things I need to fill the gaps in the woodland border

Grasses as ground cover under dense shrub canopies like this rhododendron...I liked how the grass clumps made a sort of rhythm in the planting - the same without being 'samey'...they don't merge into one another as my assortment of 'green shrubs' do, instead they punctuate the space.

Couldn't resist the colours of this Cotinus alongside the Hakonechloa - I think that's another abelia in the background, they were everywhere at Knoll.  

This central area was planting with a more 'traditional' prairie mixture of grasses and perennials, but as you can see, with the advantage of the borrowed background of the establish shrubs and trees in the rest of the garden it gives it quite a different feel, I think, to the classic Piet Oudolf type of planting.  I felt this was a much more do-able naturalistic style, more easily translatable to the domestic garden.  We do not live in a public park with acres of flattish open ground - we live in a more intimate space.

Another idea to take away - epimediums were used as ground cover everywhere at Knoll, revealing them to be very flexible candidates.  I used an epimedium as ground cover in my little shady front garden at the old house, but I had never realised how well their form associated with grasses until I saw them here.

The information board for this area was also very inspiring when I considered the issues I have at Windy Acre.  Any homemade compost I can produce - no matter how large the quantity - is dedicated first and foremost to the annual top up of the veg patch beds, whether they be vegetable, fruit or cutting beds, as I operate this area by the no dig system, so the 2 inches or so of compost mulch is sacrosanct.  Any leafmould I produce is allocated to the woodland areas, which basically constitute most of the south and west sides of the garden, and of course there is never enough anyway! I don't want to have to buy in an annual mulch for the circle bed.  At Knoll they chop down everything in February, and simply chop it up as they go, into shorter lengths just as you would if you were adding the material to the compost heap...except here they chop it and place it straight on the ground around the plants, to mulch them in situ.  Now doesn't that sound like an ideal solution for my circle bed?

I took this photo to remind myself of the growth habit of the phlomis - it looks great here 'dead' with the funny little pom pom flowerheads silhouetted against the paler golds of the grasses.  But I have only seen it before in pictures of it's summer clothes, which mainly focus on the upper stem and the flowers - I didn't realised what a ground hugging habit of foliage it has, with the flower stems rising clear of the low mat of leaves.  What another fab ground cover/weed suppressing plant!

Bergenias with grasses - gorgeous. And just my sort of bench.

The same view from right up by the bench, with the ground cover behind being a geranium carpeting beneath the skeleton of a delightfully arching shrub

I forget how lovely yellow berries can look too - when I'm busy getting carried away with the glories of red and orange hips and berries.  But Knoll is truly a golden place, and this photo captured that for me.

I am determined to return to visit again in the other seasons - I would love to observe how the grasses look within the wider garden setting for example in early spring when they've just been cut back and are just beginning to regrow, and of course also in summer.