Of butterflies and moths

A little more Wales, which seems like a while ago now. A storm moved in and whipped up waves on the lake. The castle is Conwy Castle, built between 1283 and 1287. I can't imagine how, it's completely amazing. The old town walls are apparently some of the finest and most complete in Europe and are part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I'd love to visit in winter when it's quiet and have a really good look round.

At the moment I've been enjoying the warm evenings, walking about the place with the dog as the sun sets. Windows are thrown open to try and capture a breath of air and lights are on as the evenings draw in. It's been lovely, although the afternoons have been a bit hot for my taste and I do love regular rain keeping everything green.

On the subject of green, let's talk about box moths. I don't know if it's the same across the country, but they have absolutely devastated box hedges here. There has been a little damage over the past couple of years, but this year, oh my. Below is a box ball a few weeks into the summer.

The other ten or so I have were in similar shape. Then in a matter of days, they were like this:

Shall we take a look at the culprit?

There must be hundreds of thousands of them. Big box hedges have been reduced to straw, it's astonishing. There were around eight box moths in the bathroom the other evening. 

I have ordered some yew plants to replace the box, but they'll take a while to grow. In the meantime I have quite a few empty pots. 

I've added a few acers and ferns though, which should be nice when they're bigger. I do like lots of green shady stuff. The back of the house faces south, so I put the shady stuff along the east-facing fence where it's not too brutally sunny. I have a prized acer at the moment (prized by me, probably not to anyone else, it's not exactly spectacular, but I have high hopes) and I am moving it round during the day to keep it out of the sun. 

Something that has surprised me is that a cloud of butterflies has turned up to feed on the ripe figs. There are a handful that are too high up to pick, and I have had red admirals fluttering around them every day, it's been lovely. No pictures, they've been too high up, but I do have a gatekeeper for you. 

I have also tackled the pond, which is a non-favourite job. Although the anticipation is worse than the actual job. Once I've got a grip of myself and plunged my hands into the murky depths it's quite satisfying. The frogs and newts have more space to swim about now that most of the waterlily and weed have been removed.

Not much news at the moment. I am working hard now the urchins are back at school and learning as much as I can about writing and self-publishing in my spare time. And also cooking the mountain of windfall apples that I have this year. I thought about getting a dehydrator and making apple rings, but I'm trying not to eat too much sugar. Although of course cooked apple has exactly the same amount of sugar, so I don't know where my logic is on that. 

I've noticed that People can be quite slow to take a homegrown apple out of the fruit bowl if it has a blemish on it. I usually have to rant at them a bit to persuade them. Ridiculous, because they taste sublime. Luckily ranting is one of my strengths.

Hope all is well at your end and that you have apples and butterflies aplenty. I'd be interested to know if box moths are as common and have done as much damage where you are. CJ xx

As wise as David Beckham

 

Photos from a week in beautiful North Wales. How fast a summer week flies by. How fast a whole summer flies by in fact. There has been walking and kayaking and rock climbing and surfing. The dog went on a boat, which he hated, as did another less portable dog. He also found the kayaking very stressful and stayed in the lake too long trying to keep everyone together and got cold and shivery.

Other major shocks included sheep strolling about the streets, a hang glider dropping out of the sky i front of him and the above goat, which was larger than it looks in the picture. I persuaded the dog to edge a bit closer for a photo and we both jumped out of our skins when it had a huge snorty sneeze. 

On the home front, I have been tackling a couple of enormous evergreens this evening. It's one of those jobs that I started on a whim and may live to regret. Now I have a couple of enormous evergreens with a giant chunk cut out of the sides and more green waste than I know what to do with. The inside of the trees is very brown and dry. Fire hazard dry. The trees are overhanging the new neighbour's garden, but it turns out they like trees and are quite happy with them, so I'm trimming rather than removing. At the moment the trees are winning.

When we moved in, they were small and manageable. Somehow they have romped away when I wasn't looking. But the pigeons love nesting in them each year and the smaller birds like to look for insects in there, so they are quite nice to have. They look vastly better from upstairs, where you are eyeball to eyeball with the birds and it's like being in a nest.

The littlest boy, who incidentally is now 15 and taller than me, has been making me laugh. He absolutely loves a treasure hunt and suggested I hide his phone and give him a clue/riddle as to where it was. I could immediately see the problem with that plan, in the event that he didn't find it straightaway, so I gave him an easy clue. I hid it next to an owl and said, A wise one can help you. 

After things degenerated and got a bit tantrummy I helped him a bit by asking him what word he immediately thought of when I said 'wise'. Oh my. He did not immediately think of 'owl'. In fact he did not think of owl at all and things got even more tense. Some of his guesses were 'bread' and 'David Beckham'. Suffice to say he has very different thought processes to me. And probably to the rest of the world. I gave the clue to a brother in the end who found the phone in ten seconds flat.

Another conversation that made me laugh involved a mention of Leonard Cohen. Littlest boy: Was that the bloke that invented the spud gun? In case you were wondering, it wasn't. I did check, in case he knew something that I didn't and LC had put it together in an idle moment in between writing songs and wrestling with poetry.

Any wisdom at your end? I do hope so. CJ xx

Bird people arrive

 

Greetings from the middle of summer. I am rather enjoying all of the rain and the greenness everywhere, it feels how it should be somehow.

I have been noticing that box hedging everywhere locally has been looking dreadful. I have some box in pots as well as in the ground and I can see that its days are numbered. Box moth is the problem. It's gone from a small area of damage to widescale destruction. A shame, but I'll just find something else to grow instead. 

The bin men are on strike around here at the moment so I am trying not to do too much pruning in the garden unless I can compost the stuff myself as the recycling centre has descended into chaos. The street bin chap has not been impressed as he is having to empty bins with nine bags of rubbish next to them, or stuffed with bottles so that he can't even lift the bag or, on one occasion, with actual concrete blocks in it. 

He is particularly cross because the recycling and household bin people are already paid a huge amount more than him and all they have to do is wheel the bin to the lorry and hook it up and not trudge across fields in the rain to a lone bin. I told him he should go on strike. 

There has been a knock-on effect with the roads leading to recycling centres completely clogged up and businesses losing money as they can no longer access them. One local operation has apparently lost thousands. 

The garden is absolutely full of birds at the moment eating all of the fruit. I am pretty much leaving them to it. Happy to share. Although it's a bit disappointing when the blackbirds pull off a blueberry, drop it and pick another one instead. Food waste! I have been picking them up and putting them on the bird table.

We have new neighbours and I am very excited to see that no only do they have actual plants, including herbs and lavender, (there hasn't been a single plant in the garden for years), they have a nest box, a bird bath and a bird table with food on it. Bird people! 

Cricket teams were back out yesterday after a damp couple of weeks. One local team put six first team players in a lower team, which caused rather a fuss. Honestly, it is all taken so seriously. I have seen grown men have lengthy temper tantrums on more than one occasion. Did you know that there's even scope for the home team's cricket tea provision to be rated and reported upon? And if the umpire makes a wrong call, oh my. It is NEVER forgotten.

I am wondering if I should get a Kindle. I don't really like reading hardbacks, especially if I want to take my book in a bag somewhere, plus sometimes the print is a bit small. I pulled my copy of Pride and Prejudice off of the shelf last night and put it back because the font just wasn't big enough. Any recommendations for which sort of Kindle is best? I don't need it to be all-singing, all-dancing, just easy on the eye if you know what I mean. And lightweight, but I am assuming that they are all lightweight. I would have loved one when I went travelling on my bicycle years ago. As it was, I had a single book with me (Anna Karenina) which I eked out over six months. Yes, it was a long time ago :) 

I hope all is good at your end and that you have the right amount of rain and a good book to read. CJ xx

Elephants in the garden

 

Photos from an afternoon garden tour at Highgrove House. For overseas peeps, that's the King's country home. And very nice it was too. I booked it ages ago, assuming as I always do that at some distant future date I would somehow have spare time to go swanning around country estates. And of course when it actually came around to it I didn't really, but I went anyway. Work has been busy, busy, busy lately, and I rarely take an afternoon off, so it was lovely.

The guide told us that the garden 'wasn't manicured', and it was really refreshing to see the odd thing that had been nibbled or an apple tree that looked a bit like mine. Apparently the King doesn't much like stuff to be cut back either, so there are lots of climbing plants over the house that aren't to be touched.

The pictures are from outside the private gardens, with no photos allowed inside. You can see inside here though. 

I left with a really good feeling about my own scruffy not-always-productive garden, which was nice. I imagine if I went to the Chelsea Flower Show I'd get home and look at my patch and be a bit despondent. But Highgrove was very encouraging. Let it all grow! It's all brilliant, let's just see what comes up etc. The wildflower meadow had faded this late into the season, but there were still lots of butterflies. 

Takeaways were:

1. Don't give up on the olive tree (mine had some sort of leaf problem and I was thinking about composting it)

2. More wildflowers - keep going and just see what comes up every year

3. Yew always looks amazing

4. Keep planting thyme - theirs hadn't done very well, so they were replanting

5. A group of life-sized elephants on the grass is absolutely the way to go

I bought a little salvia to go with my (small) collection, none of which are doing very well at the moment for some reason. I suspect some old potting compost might have been to blame, so I've repotted.

I've been loving the showers (except yesterday when me and the dog pushed our luck on a long evening walk and had to stand under some plum trees for about 15 minutes to avoid a deluge). The local authority have planted lots of saplings and they were struggling in the dry weather, so it has been nice to seem them well-watered and perking up nicely.

In other news it is of course perilously close to the end of term. As above, I always imagine I will somehow magically have time off, only to take on a load of work at the last minute. But the urchins are fairly self-sufficient and don't generally need to be taken to the seaside or to see the goat at the garden centre any more. 

I am knowing my limits this year and not pretending I will accomplish all sorts of amazing summer things, such as fantastic trips, arts and crafts projects, minor garden construction (raised beds, hedgehog house refurbishment and insect hotels), working through the To Be Read pile, decluttering and award-winning cuisine. You can see I haven't even thought about it.

How is everything at your end? I hope summer (or winter) is chugging along nicely. CJ xx

Barbara Kingsolver in Bath

 

Dubious flower arranging skills with some tulips received as a gift after the littlest boy rescued a neighbour's dog from the street after he had escaped. There was chocolate too but I haven't seen any of that. 

The grass in the back garden (unmown since April) is gradually attracting pollinators as the flowers appear. Also beloved of bees are the raspberry flowers, foxgloves and chives. In fact, bumble bees are living in the nest box now, which is lovely. I'm glad I spotted them though as I generally shin up a ladder and clear the nest box out in July by reaching up and in and taking out old nesting material. Imagine my surprise...

I had the most amazing evening last week when I went to see Barbara Kingsolver in Bath. I was partway through Demon Copperhead, her latest novel, when I happened to find out that she would be in the UK. By some miracle, three of the dates were not far from me. 

She is my joint favourite author (along with Philip Pullman) and what I've read so far of Demon Copperhead is just stunning. 

She did a brilliant interview, talking about how she wanted to tell the story of the opioid crisis in Appalachia but she didn't know how to approach it until she stayed at the house in Broadstairs where Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield. She sat down at his desk and pretty much heard his voice saying, 'You tell the child's story'. So she did.

I believe that some of the background is that it suited certain industries (timber, coal and tobacco) to keep the population in Appalachia uneducated, providing a constant supply of workers. The area is incredibly poor and I think the most badly affected by the opioid crisis. I read later that health insurance there really only buys a pill most of the time. Doctors were given backhanders by the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma to prescribe OxyContin to patients, an opioid that is very addictive and that has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths as well as utter misery for many more. I've been reading about it since and it is utterly horrific. American friends no doubt know a lot more about it.

From what I've read of the novel so far, Barbara deals expertly with the subject, which might otherwise have been difficult to read about. I'll let you know what I think when I've finished it. But definitely a story that needed to be told. It was a complete privilege to hear her speak as well. Hurray for coming to the UK! 

I sat near a librarian who told me that she reads extensively and that this is the best book she has read in ten years. It has already won a Pulitzer prize and has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, to be announced on 14 June. I'm really hoping it wins.

Lovely picture of Barbara in the UK here.

Hope all is well at your end. CJ xx